Quotes About Assimilation

The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

We can eat and digest everything from rancid mammary gland secretions to fungi to rocks (or cheese, mushrooms, and salt if you prefer euphemisms).

People cannot see anything that really is without becoming like it.

A man don't always have to change the land. He can find a way to fit in.

Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.

The general rule is that whoever thinks, sings, acts, and speaks Indian is a skin, a full-blood, and whoever acts and thinks like a white man is a half-blood or breed, no matter how Indian he looks.

I don't know whether I am a louse under the white man's skin. I hope I am.

Many times I asked my grandmother, "Why don't you teach me the language?" Her answer always was: " 'Cause we want you to get an education, to live a good life. Not have a hard time. Not depend on nobody. Times coming up are going to be real hard. You need a white man's education to live in this world. Speaking Indian would only hold you back, turn you the wrong way.

You must kill the Indian in order to save the man! " That was part of trying to escape the hard life. The missions, going to church, dressing and behaving like a wasi?un—that for her was the key which would magically unlock the door leading to the good life, the white life with a white-painted cottage, and a carpet on the floor, a shiny car in the garage, and an industrious, necktie-wearing husband who was not a wino.

Even the most white-manized Sioux is still half horse.

I was a piece of cheese being shoved into a mold.

Ik denk dat ik domweg te normaal ben. - Ayesha

We ended up in America by default, so it'll never really be our home.

You don't just get it, the way you just get a cold; you take it into your head, consider it as an idea first, play with the behaviors awhile, see if they take root.

I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

Since White America refuses to see its past, they can't really see me either. Add to that a little of Madame C.J.s magic and watch me go invisible. Watch me step outside of history. Assimilation as revolution. That's one thing that most of us know that white folks don't. Race doesn't really exist. Culture? Ethnicity? Sure. Class too. But race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting playing roles.

In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one.

Human beings, as a rule, simply don't accept things that don't fit their worldview.

The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

There is s no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else. We are a nation, not a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities. We are a people, and not a polyglot boarding house. Theodore Roosevelt

When you are the only laowai in a village of 10,000 Chinese martial artists and you've sat through several dozen films where a white man shouts, "You Chinese dog," before getting his ass kicked, it starts to irritate you. We all need role models.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat sich das Deutsche allzu widerstandslos als eine Art Dorftrottel unter den Sprachen präsentiert, der nicht in der Lage ist, für aktuelle Gegenstände aus seinem angestammten Wortschatz neue Begriffe zu bilden, und sich statt dessen auf eine Weise, die ein amerikanischer Kommentator als 'vorauseilende Unterwürfigkeit' bezeichnete, mit schlaffer, alterfleckiger Hand aus dem weltweit dampfenden englischen Breitopf bedient.

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas, it calls him a foreigner.