Quotes About Assimilation

Far from trying to parade his wealth, he wanted to blend into the scenery.

In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too.

Webster lapsed into silence. Started thinking hard. He was a smart enough bureaucrat to know if you can't beat them, you join them. You force yourself to think like they think.

The assimilation of taboo images to the everyday language of doing business produces a strange effect. It domesticates the taboo while at the same time making the everyday transactional world more porous, more open to the forbidden. The wolf of unbridled appetite slips into everyday convention in the sheep's clothing of commercial language.

Perhaps we half and halfs should always make a choice, one nationality instead of the other, one language instead of the other. We should nourish one identity and starve the other so that it would atrophy and drop off. Then we could relax and become like everyone else, we could snuggle up to the majority and fit in.

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

a whisperer of Yiddish—the lingua franca spoken by Jewish immigrants when they didn't want their American children to understand what they were saying

Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.

It was always somebody's turn. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Negroes or Chinese or Mexicans. A great wheel of bigotry, ever turning. Who got to decide what made somebody an American? America, the ideal of it at least, was its own form of elusive magic.

En Nueva York todo el mundo es de algún otro lugar.

In the camp at Les Mille I observed again in myself and in others how very quickly the human being becomes acclimated.

A 'multicultural society' is a logical and physical impossibility.

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

We are now integrated into American society and I don't like the word fashionable, because fashionable means that it's going to pass. It's not like that anymore.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

Every new refugee to a society, whether it's the United States or some other place, is subjected to fear. They are the new outsider population, the new other.

Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.

As we embrace the American dream and the freedoms it represents, we must also ensure that those who wish to enjoy those freedoms become a part of our society and learn to speak our language.

I have no bones to pick and no fight with society. And I'm willing to be and interested in being in the mainstream of society.

When you have increased migration of peoples and ethnic and religious minorities, you develop a set of rules and language the larger society can accept and the minority community can accept.

A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him.

If you have waves of immigration, you better figure out a way to turn those immigrants into red-blooded Americans, or else you end up splintering the society.