Alan Dundes Quotes

#1. 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.

Alan Dundes

#2. 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.

Alan Dundes

#3. Human beings are self-motivated. The two desires that spur human action are hunger and love. Without memory, humankind would no longer hunger for love.

Kilroy J. Oldster

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

Alan Dundes

#5. 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.

Alan Dundes

#6. The heart errs like the head; its errors are not any the less fatal, and we have more trouble getting free of them because of their sweetness.

Anatole France

#7. 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.

Alan Dundes

#8. 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.

Alan Dundes

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

Alan Dundes

#10. It was pretty clear who was winning this battle. Even though it wasn't a competition. But part of me felt like it was. Which one of us could survive without the other?

Elizabeth Eulberg

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

Alan Dundes

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

Alan Dundes

#13. Most couples manage to cooperate on child raising - for us, our brain project is our third child, so nothing different, really.

Edvard Moser

#14. The Watchers have been protecting you to the best of our ability all your life, and have been watching for your birth for approximately 1500 years." Then he added pleasantly, "Would you like some cocoa?

C.A. Gray

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

Alan Dundes

#16. So it was a win-win all the way around. It was an amazing moment, not only for myself and the team behind the film, but for DTS and for John Lasseter. He was always a big fan. He was a proponent, a supporter of the whole thing, and it just worked out.

Klay Hall

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

Alan Dundes

#18. 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.

Alan Dundes

#19. I was taught very well. My mom raised me very well, and so did my dad. I've been very blessed to have great parents that cared about me.

Justin Bieber

#20. I know that feeling when your heart repels your body, not new for me.

Shreya Gupta

#21. Rev it High. Rev it low. I'm strong, committed, and ready to go!

Brett Hoebel

#22. Willing or preferring is the same with respect to good and evil, that judging is with respect to truth or falsehood.

Anthony Collins

#23. 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.

Alan Dundes

#24. Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.

Alan Dundes

#25. Lastly I would like to thank all of the assholes in the world, without which this book would not be possible.

Albert Vidal

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

Alan Dundes

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

Alan Dundes

#28. 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.

Alan Dundes

#29. To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lovely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.

Bette Davis

#30. Every work, no matter how short or antilinear, needs momentum;

David Shields

#31. 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.

Alan Dundes

#32. I can speak of you now to anyone because I've stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.

Carol Guess

#33. 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.

Alan Dundes

#34. In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn't relinquish its lessons

Russell Brand