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Quotes About Americanization

My father has always been interested in discarding the past. He's never much liked China or the whole idea behind China or Chinese ways of thinking. He's always been much more attracted to American ways of thinking. He feels Americans are more open - they tell you what they think - and he's very much that way himself.
~ David Henry Hwang
We are always going to be influenced by America... I watched the word 'bum' go out and 'butt' come in. And part of me says, oh that's a shame, but Aussie boys are still Aussie boys.
~ Bryan Brown
I know many people on the left are suspicious of words like Americanization. To them, it can sound like a cover for white privilege and warmongering. It suggests arrogance and groupthink. But these connotations are not fixed. It is in our power to reshape them by recalling the best of America.
~ Eric Liu
A case is made—confronted by Alexander in his response to the commentators—that by the 1990s an "Americanization" of the Holocaust as well as its "Europeanization" had sanctified moral reactions to the event without an adequate self-critical reflection about the West's imperialistic and colonial policies. Thus the acknowledgment by these nations of a moral universal, necessary to prevent Holocausts, seems somewhat rhetorical.
~ Jeffrey C. Alexander
The fact that obesity in both Europe and America is chiefly a class-specific phenomenon—obese people disproportionately inhabit the lower rungs of the social scale on both sides of the Atlantic—appears hardly a matter for reflection and pales in comparison to the ubiquitous mention of the sole culprit: the "Americanization" of European life.
~ Andrei S. Markovits
This pattern—portraying unwanted changes as American or a consequence of Americanization—has been a prerogative of not only the German Left. Indeed, threats of alleged "Americanization" are voiced among conservatives just as readily to discredit their Social Democratic opponents.
~ Andrei S. Markovits
Moreover, using America and Americanization as a convenient bogeyman to garner points in an internal conflict that has nothing to do with America certainly is not confined to Germany.
~ Andrei S. Markovits
Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.
~ Rupert Murdoch
You live in El Paso, you're a pocho, an Americanized Mexican, and no one can tell Pablo that it doesn't change you. You shop in malls instead of mercados, you watch football instead of fútbol, you become another consumer in a giant machine that consumes consumers.
~ Don Winslow
In the end, a new Americanization movement can't just be about listing our privileges and immunities, which we catalog in our laws. It also has to be about reinforcing our duties, which we convey in our habits.
~ Eric Liu
The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry.
~ Robert Stone
many of us, as immigrants—or our parents or our grandparents—had chosen to leave our pasts behind just as the Goldens were now choosing, encouraging our children to speak English, not the old language from the old country: to speak, dress, act, be American.
~ Salman Rushdie
The whole world is being 'deculturalized' into a uniform 'Coca-Cola society,' wanting and needing an American way of life.
~ Helen Caldicott
I'm completely Americanized - I have an American accent, an American wife - but a residue of me is foreign.
~ Dinesh D'Souza
Living here in North America - I have been Americanized. When I go back home now, there are things that I have far less tolerance for in South Africa. We've come such a long way in terms of race relations and the economy as well as people's willingness to move on. There are still a lot of things that are frustrating about being in South Africa.
~ Kandyse McClure
Things are so much global and Americanised.
~ John Malkovich
Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.
~ Arthur Hertzberg
During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American.
~ Anne Fadiman
What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.
~ Louis D. Brandeis
President Johnson soon Americanized the war that resulted in the death of a generation.
~ Stephen Kinzer
The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.
~ Fredric Jameson
The frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting-point between savagery and civilization… the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.
~ Frederick Jackson Turner
Something of an exception in their approach to education—as indeed they often were to other things—were the Seligmans, led by Joseph, whose longing for Americanization was overpowering. Several of his brothers had early Americanized their first names. Henry was originally Hermann, William was Wolf, James was Jacob, Jesse was Isaias, and Leopold was Lippmann.
~ Stephen Birmingham
Not only do the Americans not defend our films, they buy them up just for remakes. It is shameful to kneel at their feet.
~ Jean-Paul Belmondo