Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994):

Newton and all the other great classical physicists held that the velocity of the Earth in space constituted a “privileged frame of reference.” That’s actually what it was called. Albert Einstein, a keen critic of prejudice and privilege all his life, considered this “absolute” physics a remnant of an increasingly discredited Earth chauvinism. It seemed to him that the laws of Nature must be the same no matter what the velocity or frame of reference of the observer. With this as his starting point, he developed the Special Theory of Relativity.

Alfred Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911):

The death of Archimedes by the hands of a Roman soldier is symbolical of a world-change of the first magnitude: the theoretical Greeks, with their love of abstract science, were superseded in the leadership of the European world by the practical Romans. Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his novels, has defined a practical man as a man who practises the errors of his forefathers. The Romans were a great race, but they were cursed with the sterility which waits upon practicality. They did not improve upon the knowledge of their forefathers, and all their advances were confined to the minor technical details of engineering. They were not dreamers enough to arrive at new points of view, which could give a more fundamental control over the forces of nature. No Roman lost his life because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram.