Quotes About Assimilation

No matter how long he lived in the South, Zemurray could never rise above street Spanish overlaid by his American accent, overlaid by his Russian accent. He was all overlay—identity stacked on identity, life stacked on

No matter how long he lived in the South, Zemurray could never rise above street Spanish overlaid by his American accent, overlaid by his Russian accent. He was all overlay—identity stacked on identity, life stacked on life.

More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.

Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate

Soon we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that's hatched goose's eggs.

They had a confidence that we lacked. And much better hair. So many colors. And we regretted that we could not be more like them.

If I made nothing of it, then surely no one else would either. ... To accustom others to my face was the best short cut to getting used to it myself.

Surely, argued the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), it was better for a Breton to accept French citizenship "than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage remnant of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.

The young (Somali) women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.

Proactive interference," Paul would have explained. "It's when previously acquired information inhibits our ability to process new information.

The two women switched to their native tongue. Kate tuned them out. She understood only half of what they were saying. As with most Americans, Dutch sounded to her more like a disease of the throat than an actual language

buy her entry into normal society, but she hadn't realized what that society was like.

Nevertheless, for weal or for woe, there is no such thing extant as Anglo-Saxon—of all nations, said to be Anglo-Saxon, in the United States least. What we still have from England, much as appearances may seem to point the other way, is not of our bone-and-marrow, so to speak, but rather partakes of the nature of importations. We are no more English on account of them than we are Chinese because we all drink tea.

Thus does the beginner, who has acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his own mother tongue; only then has he grasped the spirit of the new language and is able freely to express himself therewith when he moves in it without recollections of the old, and has forgotten in its use his own hereditary tongue.

We must have life building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.

Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.

Like the whale who swallowed Jonah, we have engulfed all national dishes known to civilized man and made them in delight, if not in name our own.

The Negro was taught to speak the white man's tongue, worship the white God, and accept the white man as his superior.

Although the mass of the people accepted the white man's God, either under physical duress or because he seemed more powerful than their own Gods, they never assimilated the ideas of Christianity.

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.

These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.

I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized.