Dave Barrett: "Lock a single programmer away in a closet for a month and I guarantee you he will underperform. Make him have to
stand up and tell his teammates how much work he's done each day, and he'll do a bit better. Give him someone to bounce ideas off, and he will do even better. Give him someone to ask for help when he's stuck, and his performance will improve even more. Give him a way to share in the sucesses of those around him and it will improve some more. And so on...." (on scrumdevelopment@yahoogroups)
unnamed business analyst: "[The business customers] respond to questions really quickly, sometimes on the same day."
Steven J. Doubleday: "XP allows small groups of programmers to coalesce around a minimum of one person with talent, to get work done in teams, that exceeds the complexity levels that they could attain as individuals." (on the XP-Coaches mailing list)
Albert Einstein: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (from a sign hanging in his office at Princeton University)
Voltaire: "All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden." (Candide, 0553211668)
Benjamin Franklin: "Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason." (Poor Richard's Almanack)
Ron Jeffries: "A clean boundary between useful abstractions and the grubby code that touches the real world is always a good thing."
Thucydides: "A man who has the knowledge but lacks the power to express it is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all."
Norm Kerth: "The Law of Wisdom Acquisition -- It is much easier to identify another's foolishness than to recognize one's own." (from Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews 0932633447, p. 3)
Virginia Satir: "Familiarity exerts a powerful pull. What we have observed and experienced day after day exerts a powerful influence. Most people will choose the familiar, even though uncomfortable, over the unfamiliar, because of that power." (from The New Peoplemaking 0831400706, pp. 144-145)
Jerry Weinberg: "Even software that is initially well designed and implemented begins to deteriorate and lose its maintainability in a software culture that doesn't regularly invest in maintainability." (from Quality Software Management: Vol. 1, Systems Thinking 0932633226)
Taiichi Ohno: "Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month’s manual should be out of date."
Yoshio Shima, Director, Toyoda Machine Works: "If you believe that standards are writ in stone, you will fail. You have to believe that standards are there to be changed."
Peter Senge: "When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It become quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit." (from The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization 0385517254)
Kathy Sierra: "Today, the more you try to prevent failure, the more likely you are to fail."
Jim Rough: "The gas of a self-organizing dynamic is trust and the maintenance is the on-going conversations that build that trust. The facilitator helps assure the quality of conversation about issues that build trust."
Jim Rough: "To assume that people need to be motivated through incentives, rewards, recognition or punishments, is to diminish them."
Goethe: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."
Ward Cunningham: "If you don't think carefully, you might think that programming is just typing statements in a programming language."
Ron Jeffries: "As most observers will have noticed, I tend to use the word 'defect' in preference to 'bug'. I do that because bugs creep in, and defects are put in. I mildly prefer 'defect' to 'error', because I find that 'error' focuses attention on the individual more than I prefer, while 'defect' helps us focus on the effect, so that we can more readily look at all the causes, not just the proximate one."
Bob Sutton: Sutton's Law: "If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong. Someone else probably already had it. This idea isnt original either; I stole it from someone else."
Ron Jeffries: "Of course the universe is out to get us, but it's not going to do it by passing a null to one of our methods."
Jim Bullock: "What slows projects down the most, at least what I have seen, is activity unrelated to progress."
John Gall, Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." (from Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, 0812906748)
Ron Jeffries: "Quick and dirty solutions can get you part of the product early, but they may bog down afterwards. This might mean that we couldn't give our customer what they really need long term. Well-factored code can be maintained indefinitely."
Michael Bolton: "The common element between Bad Traditionalist processes and Bad Agile Processes is that both want to remove that irritating thinking part."
William Pietri: "To me, good domain code is a formal and rigorous way of expressing the fundamental notions of the system. It's both the foundation for the rest of the structure and the way I communicate with fellow developers both current and future."
Jennifer Granick ([http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70971-1.html Wired News]): "The truth is, American society would not work if we had perfect enforcement of the law."
Thomas Jefferson: "I never saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument."
Gerald Weinberg: "The architect without the stonemason is not designing cathedrals, but castles in the air."
Anonymous: "What you you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
Jeff McKenna on the defining characteristic of Agile development: "Why, it is the taking of small steps."
Alex Chafee: "The model calculates; the view iterates."
Donald Knuth: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Martin Fowler: "Making big changes where a system is broken for a while is restructuring. Restructuring is a Good Thing, but it isn't refactoring. Restructuring is something I did a lot, till I saw how Kent refactored his code: taking steps that were laughably small. I noticed he went faster, tended not to get into trouble, and if a test broke he knew quickly and could use diff debugging to help fix it fast."
Steve McConnell: "Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer." (from Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, 1556154844)
Donald E. Knuth: "Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do."
Barry Boehm: "Agile methods derive much of their agility by relying on the tacit knowledge embodied in the team, rather than writing the knowledge down in plans."
Brian Kernigan: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
Martin Fowler: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." (from Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 0201485672)
Frederick P. Brooks: "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."
Andrew Hunt and David Thomas: "Some things are better done than described....Here's a challenge for you. Write a short description that tells someone how to tie bows in their shoelaces. Go on, try it!" (from The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, 020161622X)
Dave Barry: "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings."
Ted Husted (Strut committer): "Life is too short to use application frameworks that aren't being written by writing applications."
A. A. Milne: "Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't."
Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby): "If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we'd all be millionaires."
Adam Dymitruk: "Doing TDD does not require you to leave your brain with the coat check."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955): "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."
Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Albert Einstein: "Knowledge is that which remains when you have forgotten everything you learned in school."
Albert Einstein: "Not all that counts can be counted, and not all that can be counted, counts."
Albert Einstein: "The only source of knowledge is experience."
Andre Gide: "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."
Andre Gide: "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again."
Andre Gide: "It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
Andre Gide: "So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity."
Andrew S. Tanenbaum: "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from."
Anonymous: "God grant me the senility to accept the things I cannot change, The frustration to try to change things I cannot affect, and the wisdom to tell the difference."
Anonymous: "Lemmings, as a group, have a very bad reputation. But no individual lemming has ever been singled out for blame."
Anonymous: "Some men are discovered; others are found out."
Anonymous: "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
Anonymous: Heu, vitam perdidi, operose nihil agendo. "Alas, I have wasted my life, industriously doing nothing."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery Wind, Sand and Stars: If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery Wind, Sand and Stars: Perfection is reached not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
Benjamin Franklin, 1759: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Bill Gates: "We're only healthy if the industry as a whole is healthy and thriving. Most types of software aren't appropriate for us to do. For those that are, we'll always have competition."
Blaise Pascal: "I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short."
Bob Pease: Milligan's law (named for an acquaintance of his): "If you notice anything funny, record the amount of funny."
Brian Kernighan: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
C. A. R. Hoare: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
C.A.R. Hoare, in The Emperor's Old Clothes, Turing Award Lecture (27 October 1980): "At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way---and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
Carl Sagan: "All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value."
Dale Emery: "Integrity and courage are contagious. But they can have a long incubation period."
Dan Strychalski (with thanks to Arthur C. Clarke): "To the ignorant mind, any sufficiently slick commercial gimmickry is indistinguishable from technological progress."
Dee Hock: "Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can rent the body and influence the mind but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and ethics."
Donald Knuth: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
Doug Larson: "Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none."
Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."
Edgar Allan Poe: "I have great faith in fools -- self confidence my friends call it."
Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Eisenhower: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
Elbert Hubbard: "Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."
Eric Hodges: "I just don't want to jeopardize my confidence that I've fixed a bug. There's a Zen saying, "You can never step in the same river twice." The meaning is that the river and the person are always changing. I don't need any Zen crap in my code. I want reproducible results."
Eric Hodges: "It pisses off some people when you suggest that life emerged without conscious comprehension of its overall structure. We seem to get upset and scared when we don't feel like *someone* is driving."
Ernest Hemingway: "Never mistake motion for action."
Euripides: Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Francis Bacon: "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
George Burns: "If you live to the age of a hundred you have it made because very few people die past the age of a hundred."
Ghandi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Gilbert K. Chesterson: "The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid."
Glaser and Way: "The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it."
H.P. Lovecraft: "The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
Henri Amiel: "Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour germinates no more."
Henrik Ibsen: "You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty."
Henry Ford: "You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do."
Henry J. Tillman: "Life is something that everyone should try at least once."
Heraclitus (circa 540-480 BC): "On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow." or "You cannot step into the same river twice."
Herbert Spencer: "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
Hoare's Law of Large Problems: "Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out."
Hunter S. Thompson, (Fear and Loathing '72): "He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving 'normally.'"
J. Edgar Hoover: "I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."
J. P. McEvoy: "Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming."
J.D. Hildebrand: "I once had a therapist tell me in confidence that he didn't really believe in change. I think he's right--people don't change. Sometime very early in life you are given the keys to a great big house. One room is full of learning, another full of patience, there's a closet full of mechanisms that turn frustration into anger, whatever your personality is. As you go through life, you have the opportunity to spend more time in some rooms than others. But you're stuck with that house. There's no remodeling, no real change."
James Thurber: "You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
Jeff Rothenberg: "Digital information lasts forever or five years -- whichever comes sooner."
Jerry Weinberg: "Look to the past only for understanding."
Jing Fa: "If names and real items do not correspond with each other, there will be fighting."
John Ciardi: "A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea."
John Maxwell: "The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one."
John Maynard Keynes (from the The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money): "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally."
Joshua Kerievsky: "If a team of completely inexperienced programmers follows XP they will still be ahead of the curve. Their inability to know where or how to refactor, along with their ignorance of patterns, will yield code that is bloated and badly designed. However, that code will be tested and the test suite will serve as a speed-promoting safety net. The team won't ever have a fast velocity if they don't learn to be better programmers, but they will produce a system and be far ahead of the inexperienced teams that let QA write the tests."
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle: "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
Lao Tzu: "A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
Larry Constantine: "Abstraction is a means to ends, a basic tool of software engineering that we use to distill the essence of user needs toward writing less software to deliver the same capability."
Laurent Bossavit: "Treat people as ends not means. In business situations, however, this attitude is far from the norm. It is IMHO at the heart of what separates 'management' from 'leadership'."
Law of the Jungle: "He who hesitates is lunch."
Leonard Brandwein: "Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers."
Lily Tomlin: "Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then--we elected them.
Mae West (1892-1980): "He who hesitates is a damned fool."
Mark Twain (1835-1910): "Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
Mark Twain: "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
Mark Twain: "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
Martin Fowler: "If you can not change your organisation, then change your organisation."
Maureen Murphy: "The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces."
Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Millard Fuller: It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.
Newlan's Truism: "An 'acceptable' level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job."
Niccolo Machiavelli: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."
Oscar Wilde: "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."
Oscar Wilde: "Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
P. J. O'Rourke: "The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."
Pablo Picasso: "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
Paul B. MacCready, designer of the Gossamer Condor: "Treat every problem as if it can be solved with ridiculous simplicity. The time you save on the 98% of problems for which this is true, will give you ridiculous resources to apply to the other 2%."
(apparently not) Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC: "We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized ... I was to learn later in life that we meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."
Phlip: "An old, beautiful Utne Reader article divides all actions into 4 categories: Win/Win, Theft, Altruism, and Stupidity. Theft is where you gain and someone else loses. Altruism is the reverse, and Stupidity is where both sides lose."
Phlip: "You can't use logic to talk someone out of a position they did not enter using logic."
Picasso: "Everything you can imagine is real."
Publius Syrus: "Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."
Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand."
Ralph A. Mack: "Within any large project is a small project crying to be set free."
Richard Feynman: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love: "Never try and teach a pig to sing: it's a waste of time, and it annoys the pig."
Robert Frost: "A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."
Ron Jeffries: "Are they shipping running tested software that someone wants every week? If not, then they may have missed the point of XP and all the agile methods."
Ron Jeffries: "I was taught by Kent Beck that need for a comment is the code's way of asking to be more clear. I strive to make the code more clear and to see if the need for the comment goes away. Usually it does."
Ron Jeffries: "Improvement stops when we start believing that ideas about how to improve are insulting."
Ron Jeffries: "As long as you always keep an open mind, that's what counts. That way you can be sure you don't hear things that aren't being said, and do hear what is being said. This third sentence suggests that the second sentence may be false and that the first sentence may offer a reason why."
S. J. Gould, Wide Hats and Narrow Minds: "... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number."
Seneca, Epistolae, VII,7: Homines dum docent discunt. "Men learn while they teach."
Somerset Maugham: "After four hours a day, the writer is kidding himself."
Soviet Army saying: "Don't rush to implement your commander's orders. Wait until he changes his mind."
T.H. White,The Once and Future King: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
The Flying Karamozov Brothers: "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once."
The Flying Karamozov Brothers: "Wherever you go, there you are."
Theodore H. White: "The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment."
Thomas Edison: "There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking."
Tom Robbins: "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
Vin McLellan: "Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege."
W. Somerset Maugham: "People ask for criticism, but they only want praise." (Of Human Bondage, 1915, 055321392X)
W. Somerset Maugham: "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." (Strictly Personal, 1941, 0405078293)
W. Somerset Maugham: "At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely." (Writer's Notebook, 1949, 0405078323)
W. Somerset Maugham: "Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."
W. Somerset Maugham: "It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
W. Somerset Maugham: "There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."
Walt Kelly (Pogo): "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Walt Kelly: "Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent."
Walt Kelly: "Many years ago in a period commonly know as Next Friday Afternoon, there lived a King who was very Gloomy on Tuesday mornings because he was so Sad thinking about how Unhappy he had been on Monday and how completely Mournful he would be on Wednesday ..."
Will Durant: "One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
Will Rogers: "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
William Baumol: "If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a conclusion."
William Blake: "It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."
William Blake: "To generalize is to be an idiot."
William Safire's Rules for Writers: "Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives."
Woody Allen: "There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?"
Stephen Hawking: tells the story of an elderly woman who confronted Bertrand Russell at the end of a lecture on orbital mechanics, claiming she had a theory superior to his. "We don't live on a ball revolving around the Sun," she said, "we live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle." Wishing to humor the woman Russell asked, "And what does this turtle stand on?" "On the back of a second, still larger turtle," was her confident answer. "But what holds up the second turtle?" he persisted, now in a slightly exasperated tone. "It's no use, young man," the old woman replied, "it's turtles all the way down." (from A Brief History of Time 0553103741)