cement quotes

Wildness and silence disappeared fromthe countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.

- Archibald MacLeish
  'The Great  American Frustration', in the Saturday Review, 9  Jul.

No one ever complains if a great artist says that he was driven to create a masterpiece by a hunger for recognition and money.But a scientist? Well, he ismeant to be disinterested, pure, his ambition merely to descry the cement of the universe. He isn't meant to use it to start laying his own patio.

-Will Self
The QuantityTheory of Insanity and Five Supporting Propositions,'The QuantityTheory of Insanity'.