Quotes About Assimilation

Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.

My teacher was like, 'Once you pass age nine or ten, it's almost impossible to completely lose an accent.' I did lose it quite a bit, but Indians can always tell.

America's a melting pot, all races, cultures, religious choices.

Do you know what integration really means? It means intermarriage. That's the real point behind it. You can't have it without intermarriage. And that would result in disintegration of both races.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by friction.

I am almost German now.

If I grew up, you know, in the ghetto, like, and I wasn't taught any other way to talk or a way to act or other food to eat or just like anything like that, like, when I'm I supposed to do? You know, like, is there a class I'm supposed to take to learn how to be white, you know?

I lost my accent pretty quickly, so everyone assumes I was born and raised in America. But I'm very much still in touch with my Filipino roots. That will never go away.

One good thing about being brought up with Chinese food from another country means that you're not a purist and you will accept deviation.

If there is only one culture all over the world, that's not a good thing.

To chew and digest everything, however—that is the genuine swine-nature! Ever to say ye-a—that hath only the ass learnt, and those like it!

The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro...Sir, the Irish-American will one day find out his mistake.

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

Our eyes find it easier on a given occasion to produce a picture already often produced, than to seize upon the divergence and novelty of an impression: the latter requires more force, more "morality." It is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly. When we hear another language spoken, we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds into words with which we are more familiar and conversant—

Please also feel free to read this case a few times as it may take a while to sink in.

It took me three years to learn to dress in the American way, especially in winter. That was just like me. I barely wear socks even now.

While I was able to pass as white as soon as I came to America, this was not really possible while I was growing up, as it was pretty obvious that I wasn't 'all German.' So my privilege was that in America, I could conveniently withhold one of my bloodlines and avoid racism and discrimination. That is not a privilege most people of color have.

If you take a perfectly well-adjusted normal person of any age from anywhere in the country and stick them in L.A., within about a week I do believe that a lot of their values and morals will start to degrade.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.

Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a 'life lie.'

Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.