Quotes About Assimilation

The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

I love how you aren't weird and awkward, despite the fact that you've been severely cut off from socialization to the point where you make the Amish look trendy.

Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.'

I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country.

"I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. All agency Indians I have seen are worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog."

In mathematics, you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Maybe that's what living in America does to you: it spreads you into far distances until you're just little bits rolling apart.

When we came to America, though, we didn't know what the right thing was.

One day she'll exist on paper in this country. She can sit on buses and take classes and get a job and never again feel that churning in her stomach if someone asks for ID.

I hear Mrs. Roble say, "You know, I've seen this happen before with the Muslim kids. I push those girls—they're so bright. Then one day they come in with a head scarf, and they say their marriage has been arranged and they're not going to college after all.

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

the trick to doing almost anything difficult was to act like someone else, someone who belonged.

My parents never understood me; they were Japanese.

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

My family isn't really Italian. We're more like Olive Garden Italian.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity -- an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.

Even the strangest situations become normal if one knows nothing else.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.

This tradition argues that education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world. This model of education supplanted an older one in which children sat still at desks all day and simply absorbed, and then regurgitated, the material that was brought their way.

Been here ever since, and it ain't all that different from home. S'long as I ignore the differences, hear?