Quotes About Assimilation

Noa knew how proper Japanese people behaved and could imitate their mannerisms faultlessly, so he ate whatever was put in front of him and was grateful. However, he preferred to eat a nourishing bowl of simple food quickly and be done with it. He ate the way most working Koreans did: Tasty food was merely necessary fuel, something to be eaten in a rush so you could return to your work.

My dad's whole family is in Madras and I was born in America so we didn't have that big Indian community. I don't really have anything interesting to say about it. When I talk about it people are like, 'meh, let's talk about something else.'

New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it's weird.

Foreigners have become people everywhere.

In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was.

Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.

We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this.

Adaptiveness is the shortest road to happiness. Get used to everything around you.

A person who decides, voluntarily, as an adult, unconstrained by outside circumstances, to leave her native land and adopt a hitherto unfamiliar language and culture, has to face the fact that for the rest of her life she will be involved in theatre, imitation, make-believe.

The aborigines were a source of wonder and amusement to be alternately fed, clothed, teased, educated, and petted.

A human being, as I've said before, gets used to anything.

Sometimes, when you fight a war, you become what you are fighting.

The argument is that they need to assimilate and adopt American customs. And that feeling often leads to cruelty and crime.

Why would other Italians have shunned Joey's grandfather? Was it a case of "close the door behind you?" Were they worried that newcomers would damage the foothold they'd established in the US?

It's easy for a Negro to 'pass' for white. But I don't think it would be so simple for a white person to 'pass' for colored.

Se sei diverso hai due possibilità: o ti distingui o cerchi di passare inosservato

We should imitate bees," Seneca wrote, "and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it is apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.

You've made more of a life here in three weeks than you've done in five years in Atlanta. I only wonder that you've managed to hide from the obvious for so long. This place is ideal for a Norwegian who isn't really Norwegian anymore. It positively reeks of Scandanavia, all clean and shiny and Americanized full of rules that people obey with a smile when it pleases them and break with a smile when it doesn't. Ideal for you.

The West withers every non-Western soul that touches it.

Once he settles down in the country he admires, the foreigner bastardizes exactly that which he admires.

Second Avenue, was now the Fondue Chalet. Why, Siegfried wondered, did not anyone in America understand the wonderful

One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements.

The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.

Bagdad-on-the-Subway.