Quotes About Assimilation

typical of the so-called "good Jewish bourgeoisie," which gave such marked value to Viennese culture, and which was requited by being completely uprooted

French name, English accent, American school. Anna confused.

This is what we Mexicans do:we take what exists and we make it our own.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

We have but one permanent home: heaven - that's still the old truth that we always have to re-learn - and it's only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

If differences can be hidden, perhaps there aren't differences at all

They're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.

America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.

When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, the way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren't sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: Be home by ten, okay?

A man who gives himself to the possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life… . He is not one of them… . In my case my effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes, and destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.

I wonder," James wrote, "if we haven't become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.

Page 286: Common sense on this subject tends to be warded off by ritual invocation of the cliché that we are "a nation of immigrants." In fact, the United States is not a nation of immigrants, and never has been. At no point in American history have people born abroad constituted more than a minority of the U.S. population

People are not alarmed by the unusual so long as it is placed in an acceptable context.

The feeling of being marginalized, a stranger in one's own land, is part of what makes many ethnics so responsive to any kind of media representation, sometimes even a derogatory one. A starving person will eat foul food.

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.

I'm an immigrant kid who came to America from India when I was very young and grew up in New York City with a single mom and really was influenced by all of those immigrant cultures bumping up against each other.

I'll adapt to any situation. I've been adapting to different situations my whole life.

When I grew up in France, I was a normal size. And then I came to the United States and I gained 20 pounds.

But maybe when he has worked at ShopRite longer, he will like it better. New jobs take getting used to.

Parental nurturing was replaced with forced assimilation, hard physical labor, harsh discipline, and emotional, physical, and often sexual abuse.

Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: "There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.