I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.

They do not merely collect texts; they must also gather data about the context and the informant and, above all, write an analysis of the items based upon the course readings and lecture material on folklore theory and method.

Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.

Americans have a penchant for the future and tend to disregard the past.

Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.

My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses.

There is more to folklore research than fieldwork. This is why in all of my other upper-division courses I require a term paper involving original research.

Americans do believe in progress and there is almost certainly a kernel of truth in the joke.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which we look, we can see that there is far too great an emphasis placed on the future.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.

Their term project consists of a fieldwork collection of folklore that they create by interviewing family members, friends, or anyone they can manage to persuade to serve as an informant.

I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.

The best thanks we could offer those who went before and raised the Irish working class from their knees was to press forward with determination and enthusiasm towards the ultimate goal of their efforts, a Co-operative Commonwealth for Ireland.

Make no mistake: The organization of the working class must be both economic and political. The capitalist is organized upon both lines. You must attack him on both.

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.

I once said, "We will bury you," and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.

I certainly did feel inferior. Because of class. Because of strength. Because of height. I guess if I'd been able to hit somebody in the nose, I wouldn't have been a comic.

I grew up in Michigan, in a very small town, Centreville. In my graduating class, I had like 92 people.

These interests of the workers, as the exploited and oppressed, class of society, are the same in all countries.

We need to work together, on a bipartisan basis, to create new jobs, increase job training, enact real and substantive middle class tax relief, and reward companies that create jobs at home.

At one point in college I was so shy that I'd drop out of a class if asked to speak in front of other people.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

I was a class clown.

I made a living out of being a class clown.

Show class, have pride, and display character. If you do, winning takes care of itself.

I have thought about the next steps, and you know, they still don't know that I can dance. They don't know it, and it's frustrating me because I feel that it's an edge that I have, and I'm not talking about I took this hip hop class, I'm talking about this is how people actually know me.

I met Kevin when I was 19, at a Second City workshop. We were paired up together in the first class I went to. By the end of the class we formed our improv group, and over the next three years we performed leading up to the formation of The Kids in the Hall.

Making my class laugh and getting in trouble. I was the class clown.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.

Alan Moore does have a sheen of class. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure there was a metaphoric level, I'm not denying that, but let's face it. the main reason he was doing a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company.

I remember an article, I can't recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

If you travel first class, you think first class and you are more likely to play first class.

Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.