Quotes About Assimilation

If you were going to compete successfully in a white man's world, you had to learn to play the white man's game. It was not enough that an Indian be as good as; an Indian had to be better than.

We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country.

English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.

Civilization has been thrust upon me . . . and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity. —LUTHER STANDING BEAR, OGLALA SIOUX, 1868–1937 On

Quizá finalmente ese sea el precio de vivir en un país extranjero. No es sólo que vives una vida distinta de la que dejaste atrás. Es que la vida en el extranjero te vuelve extraño.

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

The French state insists that once someone becomes French by citizenship, his ancestors become, metaphorically speaking, the Gauls, and he is therefore not to be distinguished from any other Frenchman, in statistics or anywhere else. It would take considerable conceptional subtlety as well as empirical knowledge to disentangle the truth and lies of all this.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans.

There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American.  The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.  We are a nation, not a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities.  We are a people, and not a polyglot boarding house.

The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.  We are a nation, not a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities.  We are a people, and not a polyglot boarding house.

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

Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient.

Hence beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind---because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every cognitive faculty. Now since knowledge is by assimilation, and similarity relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.

I've been to so many parties in England and in America that's exactly like that, where you're kind of, like, seen as Other. When you're just living your life, and you have to adopt the Other in order to understand and navigate the society.

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

I don't necessarily feel like I'm American. I wouldn't know what that feels like.

All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.

When I was growing up, I lived in a neighborhood that was largely Latino and I thought I was Latino!

I landed in New Jersey, where I could barely speak English, and I had to figure out what a short brown kid was going to do in this big white world.

I remember my jaw would hurt because I wasn't used to speaking English all the time. Like how, even if you exercise, you'll play kickball one day, and then you're like, 'Wait, I run, but new places are hurting because I don't use my muscles this way.' My mouth was not used to making these sounds.

Whenever you go to different countries, you learn new things and gather experience.

When a new coach comes to a new club with new ways, new ideas, the players have to adapt.