Quotes About Assimilation

One of the things I fucking hate about my fellow Americans: whenever they fly to a foreign country, first thing they do, they try to find as much of America as they can get their hands on, even if it's food in the shitty cafeteria.

We take you at your word: you are like us; now that we've 'let you in,' we expect that in your gratitude you won't pull any surprises and start behaving like some subspecies that you've assured us you're not; if we now say it's OK to be gay, we don't expect you to pull the rug out from under us and start acting queer .

The main goal here is to make ourselves "familiar enough" to straight people to win their acceptance. But why should that be of paramount importance? Precisely why would we want to do ourselves over in their image? To become more like them would be to forget our own singular history and the special insights and perspectives that derive from it, giving us, as spies in the culture, a unique perspective for evaluating and critiquing aspects of mainstream culture.

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.

Uma hipótese leva, na cabeça em que se estabeleceu ou mesmo na cabeça em que nasceu, uma vida comparável à de um organismo, já que assimila do mundo exterior apenas o que lhe é proveitoso e homogêneo. Quanto ao que é heterogêneo e prejudicial, ou ela não deixa que chegue perto, ou então, quando se trata de algo que é inevitável assimilar, expele-o novamente, intacto.

Exigir que um indivíduo conserve na sua mente tudo o que já leu é como querer que ele ainda traga dentro de si tudo o que já comeu na vida.

If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. —Horace Walpole

Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?

The West Side had become a land where people lived in layers. It was a land of prosperous immigrants. It was a place where people rented, rather than owned

in the words of the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, the policy was "to make of all the varieties of population among us, differing as they do in origin, language, habits of thought, modes of action, and social custom, one people, with one common interest."11 The accepted

You could get used to anything if you had to.

If you look like you belong in a place, most people think you do.

Sometimes it's just easier to go along.

Digest your experiences well and let this nourish the body of your life.

You just need to get used to each other.

We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.

The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.

The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74

I'm not a Jew. I'm Jew-ish. I don't go the whole hog.

L'uomo che si ritiene superiore, inferiore o anche uguale a un altro non capisce la realtà' rappresenta il vertice della saggezza e non basta una vita a farsene permeare, ad assimilarla, ad interiorizzarla in modo che cessi di essere un'idea e plasmi invece il nostro modo di vedere e di agire in ogni situazione

The notion of the 'non-Jewish Jew', formulated by Isaac Deutscher in 1958 to outline the profile of the intellectual who breaks with his inherited religion and culture, has now become a metaphor for Jewish modernity. The most

the 'non-Jewish Jew'. The implosion of the traditional

to German culture, and the path of this cultural assimilation was Bildung, the ideal of education and self-improvement set by Humboldt in the age of Aufklärung.55 In the United States, German Jews had discovered a multi-ethnic and multicultural nation in which being American meant adhering to the Constitution.

Like Sir Isaac Newton, after insight hit in falling fruit, they recognized the perfect label for Indians not sharp enough to make it all the way home, left in that space between two places. Red on the outside, white on the inside, forever locked away from both worlds, separated by the thinnest membrane.