Quotes About Assimilation

This type of mass influx is simply too much to handle. What we've had since the disaster of the 1965 Immigration Act will take 100 years or more to absorb.

Growing up, I went to many schools, and I had to fit in to many different types of environments with totally different social groups. It helps me out as I move from job to job.

I consider myself almost a Californian at this point, because I've been here long enough. Obviously, when I first came to the land of blond-haired, blue-eyed surfer types, I was the sardonic, sarcastic, liquor-swilling, chain-smoking, dark-haired, dark-eyed guy from New York.

My parents came to America in the late 1960s because my father studied for a Ph.D. in Indiana. My mother joined him later. We had ancestors who came over at the turn of the century. One worked in a laundry, as is typical of Chinese-American immigrants.

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

So my character on 'Tyrant' is a chap called Barry Al Fayeed, and he is the second son of a fictional Middle Eastern dictator. But, he has grown up since he was young in America. He's trained as a doctor. He's married a beautiful American girl, had two kids, so he's very much an American.

I've always felt more at home in the UK than in France.

So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They are more American than anything else.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

The proposition that Muslims are welcome in Britain if, and only if, they stop behaving like Muslims is a doctrine which is incompatible with the principles that guide a free society.

A fool may buy all the books in the world, and they will be in his library; but he will be able to read only those that he deserves to; and this deserving is produced by Karma. Our Karma determines what we deserve and what we can assimilate. We are responsible for what we are; and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.

they have no thought for anything else, never live a moment for any other idea, and thus the way is shortened for them. This is what is meant by concentration, intensifying the power of assimilation, thus shortening the time. Raja-Yoga is the science which teaches us how to gain the power of concentration.

Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.

If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes—some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong—and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole.

Regardless of where they come from, immigrants learn that, in America, lighter is always better, darker is always worse and black is worst. Little time passes before immigrants become prejudiced against African-Americans. This, too, is a kind of assimilation, and one that Israel Zangwill's idealistic vision never anticipated.

It's like those kids who grow up in houses where the parents speak different languages and turn out bilingual. If they're exposed to something at an early enough age, they absorb it naturally and becomes just something normal.

The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.

No man is more abhorred than a man who is different from his neighbors. They feel violated and threatened if one dares to be as they are not.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.

During my first several days there I really did feel like a fish out of water. After years of following a military dress code I wasn't even sure what to wear. The one place I felt like I fit in was out on a boat and, fortunately, trials for the freshman sailing team began right away.

There are some Chicanos who don't want to be Chicanos - they want to be Mexican-American, Hispanic, or even Spanish.

Sometimes people say to me, 'Ah, you're not really Spanish; you're British.'

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.