This is allegedly writer Michael Kinsley talking about writer Bob Novak, but in my experience it’s much more widely applicable:
Beneath the asshole is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole.
This kinda “assholes all the way down” wisecrack reminds of the old story Stephen Hawkings retailed in “A Brief History of Time”:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”
“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”
Related posts:
retold, not retailed
Actually, it’s not a typo. While I could very well have written “retold”, I did mean to write “retailed”. Yes, it can be a cliche, but it is a way of saying that someone told a gossipy story.
Here is Dictionary.com on the subject:
retail
v.tr.
1. To sell in small quantities directly to consumers.
2. To tell or repeat (gossip or stories, for example) to others.
As the second definition makes clear, my use is okay …
And this, in turn, reminds me of a “Scrubs” quote:
Dr. Cox: “People are just bastard covered bastards with bastard filling.”
That show is good.
“Turtles all the way down” is a pretty good description of modern physics; Matter is made of atoms, atoms are made of particles, particles are made of quarks, quarks are made of …
…something to do with strings…