Quotes About Assimilation

This was the power of Andrew Carnegie's legacy. He had used his wealth to set up over 2,000 public libraries across North America. Three generations after his death, they were continuing to pay dividends. These new American citizens were fortunate that Carnegie had thought long-term. For the Taiwanese boys, Carnegie had created the hardware, and their mother the software. This bode well for their assimilation and success in America.

Let me tell you, Mr. teacher when you say you'll make me right, in five hundred years of fighting not one Indian turned white

I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.

Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.

I warn black Americans'don't get too mixed. A little is fine, but not to the point where you're out of the family.

We are Muslims. My father would pawn off his Muslim in-laws as Hindus just so that he could get free pancakes.

had begun, one fine day, to regard him as stupid and absurd because the friends that she had among the younger writers and actors had assured her that he was, and she duly repeated what they had said with that passion, that lack of reserve which we show whenever we receive from without, and adopt as our own, opinions or customs of which we previously knew nothing.

And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced. Sometimes, on the other hand,

Comme le public ne connaît du charme, de la grâce, des formes de la nature que ce qu'il en a puisé dans les poncifs d'un art lentement assimilé, et qu'un artiste original commence par rejeter ces poncifs, M. et Mme Cottard, image en cela du public, ne trouvaient ni dans la sonate de Vinteuil, ni dans les portraits du peintre, ce qui faisait pour eux l'harmonie de la musique et la beauté de la peinture.

I saw all the male guests take up the similar carnations that were lying by their plates and slip them into the buttonholes of their coats. I did as they had done, with the air of spontaneity that a free-thinker assumes in church, who is not familiar with the order of service but rises when everyone else rises and kneels a moment after everyone else is on his knees.

Every time we are assailed by images of women very different from ourselves, unless these images are eliminated by being forgotten or overlaid by others, we can have no peace of mind until we have converted these strangers into something more like us, the self in that respect being similar in its action and reactions to the physical organism, which is incapable of accepting a foreign body within itself without immediately setting to work to digest and assimilate the intruder.

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.

My parents are very funny when they have to deal with anything racy or off-color. They usually pretend they don't speak English.

Mourning is not forgetting,' he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. 'It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.

White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

If we placed too high a value on the looks, manners, and morals called the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon… White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization," Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. "We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents.

Becoming American meant rejecting one of the two worlds. It meant trying to hide the grease stains saturating the paper in which your school lunch of a fried potato and egg sandwich on crusty bread was wrapped, while the rest of your classmates ate ham on white bread with mayonnaise.

Becoming American meant hearing slurs that now defined you and your people: dago, wop, guinea, spaghetti bender.

America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody.

The first weeks in the US, I was asking, 'Where is my food?'

the seat of the greatest patriotic loyalties is in the stomach. Long after giving up all attachment to the land of his birth, the naturalized American citizen holds fast to the food of his parents.

I was far too embarrassed to share the experience of Indian food at school. As a kid, you're desperate to fit in, to assimilate in some way, and everything about me stood out.

Every now and then, you get people who tend to forget what this country is about, which is a melting pot of races and cultures and freedom of speech.