Quotes About Assimilation

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.

One man out of every five who lands on our shores is a foreigner- i.e. non-Anglo-Saxon. He comes here with a foreign tongue, foreign ideals, foreign religion, with centuries of ignorance and oppression behind him, often bringing with him problems that the best statesmen of Europe have failed to solve.

Let us be French as the Americans are English.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.

Which I wish to remark - And my language is plain, - That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinese is peculiar.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

I'm getting to be a real pro at coming into things midstream and trying to catch up.

If Turkish or Moroccan boys misbehave here, it's up to us to re-educate them and, when necessary, to punish them.

The best complement I ever got from the public or producers or directors is that I just totally blend in and become the character and they don't notice me and that the play happens or the movie happens or the TV show happens.

Whether you look at 'Glee' and its normalization of gay identity or you look at the work of Martin Scorsese and the Italian-American community, American culture is able to take these stories, which are seen as marginalized, and just turn them into American stories. And you don't think twice about it.

People want you to be ordinary.

The American people love immigration. They just want it obeyed. They want the laws obeyed. They want there to be assimilation.

Everybody wants to be American, it seems; I travel enough to know.

What I said was: We want everybody to learn English because we don't want - I didn't use the word 'Spanish.'

Fire is always hungry for things that don't belong to it.

So what's really behind the 'English Only' Movement? Fear. Fear of being taken over and one day they will have to learn something different. Heaven forbid they would have to learn something new.

We found that Central Americans and Hispanics are somewhat reluctant to send their children off to school as early as Anglo-Americans born in this country. There are some cultural differences.

I think, to many people in the company, I am somewhat of an outsider.

That is something that I always want to do when I arrive somewhere is to know about the culture of the country, about the club and make sure I know what it takes to wear the jersey.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

In other countries, being from somewhere else is celebrated. But not in America.

In Australia, I grew up watching 'The Mickey Mouse Club,' my son grew up watching 'Sesame Street,' my grandson's growing up watching 'Dora The Explorer.' So we are sort of saturated with American culture from the day we're born, and to those of those who do have an ear for it, it's second nature.

All Americans knew was 'The Joy Luck Club' and children of dry cleaners trying to assimilate. The Asia that I was seeing was a world of people who are incredibly sophisticated, and I wanted to represent that side.