Quotes About Assimilation

In adopting blackface, Jolson, as one of those new immigrants, not only traded on a form that had grown in popularity during the nineteenth century, he also found the perfect means of becoming white.

Once in the United States, buttressed by the nation's legacy from the days of slavery, many of these questionably white groups became whiter with time. In effect, the black-white dynamic in the United States enabled former European "races" to become white. Some did so by drawing a sharp distinction between themselves and African Americans.24

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

I'd turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own.

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.

Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer? 'We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince everyone, including ourselves, that we don't even notice the audience.

I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

I Google 'new country, Denmark, culture shock' on my phone and drink coffee furiously. I learn that Danes drink the most coffee in Europe, as well as consuming eleven litres of pure alcohol per person per year. Maybe we'll fit in just fine after all.

Rather than demand the assimilation of Jews, he rejected them; and instead of trying to convert Jews, he declared them an implacable enemy, not of Christendom, but of Germandom. He thus turned anti-Semitism into hatred based on race, not religion

Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd it must be communicated by contagion.

Let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans…. If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.

a French lieutenant, who had been long enough out of France to forget his own language, but not long enough in England to learn ours, so that he really spoke no language at all.

Laura began to model herself more and more on those around her; to grasp that the unpardonable sin is to vary from the common mould.

China, until the modern age, imposed its own matrix of customs and culture on invaders so successfully that they grew indistinguishable from the Chinese people. By contrast, India transcended foreigners not by converting them to Indian religion or culture but by treating their ambitions with supreme equanimity; it integrated their achievements and their diverse doctrines into the fabric of Indian life without ever professing to be especially awed by any of them.

A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated fromm, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind.

There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he sees that they are accepted by those about him.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.

It was a curious thing that I who lacked all ability to become "comme il faut," should have assimilated the idea so completely as I did. Possibly it was the fact that it had cost me such enormous labour to acquire that brought about its strenuous development in my mind. I hardly like to think how much of the best and most valuable time of my first sixteen years of existence I wasted upon its acquisition.

But in the course of the war they waged against the taiga, scorching it with fire, and attacking it with iron, Makar's fathers and grandfathers, almost without knowing it, became themselves a rude part of it. They married Yakut women, and adopted the language and customs of their wives, their own features of the Russian race to which they belonged becoming obliterated and fading altogether with time.

There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot accustom himself, especially if he sees that every one around him lives in the same way.

Individual experiences being limited and individual spontaneity feeble, we are strengthened and enriched by assimilating the experience of others.

When I was in high school in America, I didn't see anyone who looked like me - hardly ever. I just thought that was normal because you don't know any better. So I used to idolize so many other people, like Sarah Michelle Gellar on 'Buffy.'

With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.