Quotessence
Home / Topics / Assimilation Quotes

Assimilation Quotes

Browse 246 quotes about Assimilation.

Related topics

ImmigrationPeopleCultureMeanWant

Assimilation Quotes

“Certainly here in the U.S., we've had fundamentalist movements that have taken very critical and hostile attitudes toward immigration and the assimilation of immigrants into our society and culture. So these tendencies are fairly universal. The problem is what if they get out of hand and become the dominant factor in a society, which can only lead to the oppression of minorities or even to war with neighboring societies with differing cultures. That's why it seems to me it's important to try to keep these tendencies toward extremism under control.”

IfsTryingImportantWarProblemHandsSeemsCultureAttitudeTakenMovementUniversalCriticalImmigrationTendenciesFactorsOppressionMinoritiesOur SocietyImmigrantsWhat IfDominantHostileExtremismAssimilationFundamentalistHad FunSociety And Culture
Author:Samuel P. Huntington
Create image

“Lev (Léon) Shestov, a Russian Jew who later became a French Jew and even converted to Catholicism, defined God not by His power to create the laws of universe, but His ability to break them at will - the capacity for miracles. God could cancel the past! For instance, God could decide retrospectively, that Socrates was never poisoned... Assimilation demanded a miracle: that you stop having been somebody else before... But only God can do it.”

PastLawUniverseCan DoAbilityBreakCapacityMiracleJewInstanceDefinedCatholicismAssimilation
Author:Zygmunt Bauman
Create image

“Perhaps I should say that in general there are three solutions to such a situation. I mean not only in Holland, but everywhere where there are minority groups: in America, in Vietnam with the Chinese. Everywhere there is the same problem. But there are fundamentally three, actually only two possible solutions. A possible solution is that the despised minority is able to establish its own state somewhere else. The other solution is a higher or lesser degree of assimilation. And the third possibility, which is not a solution at all, is the permanence of the tension and conflict over time.”

MeanProblemSituationPossibilityConflictSolutionsChineseTensionAssimilationPermanence
Author:Norbert Elias
Create image

“When Benjamin Disraeli spoke of the 'two nations' in Britain he was perfectly right, only the working classes were not exactly a nation. But the gap in behavioral standards and in outlook, and of course in standards of living, were enormous. And in course of time, at least in countries such as Britain, the working classes more or less adopted and have become assimilated to the standards of the so-called 'gentle' classes. That is assimilation.The working class has hardly been able to govern, but they are no longer outsiders in relation to the state as they were before.”

CountryRelationOutsidersWorking ClassAdoptedAssimilation
Author:Norbert Elias
Create image

“Debating the concept of race does not mean that I in any way regard this as a quarrel between neighbors over where they come from. I have perhaps said enough when I said the alternative to assimilation is that immigrant groups form their own state or go away for lack of acceptance. Why should it be less serious if quarrels and dissensions are socially related? After all, the quarrels and dissensions between Russia and America are also not racial. And yet they seem to me extremely dangerous.”

MeanEnoughDangerousAcceptanceSeriousNeighborGoing AwayAssimilation
Author:Norbert Elias
Create image

“The integration in Germany was made easier by the fact that I am probably of the third generation. So I have undergone a process of assimilation, of Jews into German society.I lived as a child in Germany, the feeling of being surrounded by people of whom the majority had very strong anti-Semitic sentiments. But there was one very odd thing in the whole milieu in which I lived: no one accepted the stigmatization. It is quite difficult. No one, my father for instance, would ever take it seriously. He would regard anti-Semites as people of no education.”

PeopleChildrenFeelingsFatherStrongDifficultJewAcceptedOddSentimentsVery StrongIntegrationAssimilation
Author:Norbert Elias
Create image

“Congress passed the 1887 General Allotment Act. And that act ended up dispossessing tribes of 90 million acres. That history of dispossession was also accompanied by a history of forced assimilation whether it was in residential schools, whether it was in dismantling traditional tribal governance structures. And the justifications for that is that you're not as good as us. Our systems are better. Our modes of education. Our ways of owning land, our ways of working have been continually cited to Indians as the reason for these government policies.”

ReasonSchoolPolicyJustificationAssimilation
Author:Robert A. Williams, Jr.
Create image

“Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a way, legitimately, to maintain your sense of specialness and difference? And how do you express that? Does it just become a kind of kitsch? You can say this of gay people, but it's true for Jewish people, Italian Americans, everyone who deals with it. It's a question of assimilation. How can you be assimilated and special at the same time?”

PeopleKindProblemSpecialGayDisappearLifestyleItalianOppressedGay PeopleAssimilationItalian American
Author:Daniel Mendelsohn
Create image

“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”

IfsNeedsMadeEnjoyClassTelevisionDaughterProgramWorkersPopulationSatisfactionEqualityNewspapersBossEstablishmentPreservationResortsEmployersAssimilationDisappearanceCadillacs
Book:One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Create image

“Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.”

MeanChangeInspiringStruggleDebateResistanceImitationAdaptabilityAssimilationAdaptingAbility To AdaptAdapting To Change
Book:Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore: Being a Treasury of Over Ten Thousand Invaluable and Inspiring Thoughts, Views, and Obervations on about Eight Hundred Subjects of Popular Interest, Collected from the Speeches and Writings of These Three Great Leaders of Modern India
Create image

“Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.”

IdeasDifferentHomePastScienceCultureSpeakLanguageHistoryGenerationsObjectsApproachDiscoveryConcernedExperiencePreparedAliensMapsCategoriesHistorianBe PreparedAssimilationCorrespondingAnthropologistsDifferent Languages
Book:Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912
Create image

“The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying - indeed a rival of the religious life.”

FeelingsLife IsBitsReligiousSensitiveInterpretationSatisfyingIronicDislikeRivalsAssimilationReactingReligious Life
Book:The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918
Create image

“Finally it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.”

WayShouldStatesWinningIndividualWishJusticeUnitedLibertyUnited StatesRightsMilitaryProveAimAffectionMissionsAdministrationHeritageEarnestArbitraryAssimilationBenevolentPhilippinesParamountIndividual Rights
Author:William McKinley
Create image

“I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.”

HomePastParentVictimRaisedHungerPrioritiesPassingPassingsRadicalGrandparentExileInheritanceDetroitAssimilationAmnesiaRespectabilityIreland And The IrishGreat GrandparentsPassing On
Author:Tom Hayden
Create image

“The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react. In the last 20 years, US industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology, but has realised little improvement in the efficiency of its knowledge workers ­ and virtually none in their effectiveness. If we could solve the problems of the assimilation of new technology, the potential would be enormous.”

IfsWayYearsHumansLooksLittlesFactsProblemWould BeLastsTechnologySuccessfulIndustryWorkersSolveImprovementEnormousBehaviourEfficiencyWorkplaceEffectivenessRealisedNew TechnologyDeliveringAssimilationHuman BehaviourKnowledge Workers
Author:John Seely Brown
Create image

“Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-makin g, assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library.”

IfsMenHeartMadeIdeasWholeCharacterRunningBrainFiveInformationBuildingAmountLibraryRiotAssimilation
Author:Swami Vivekananda
Create image

“Do you know how to digest your food? Do you know how to fill your lungs with air? Do you know how to establish, regulate and direct the metabolism of your body -- the assimilation of foodstuff so that it builds muscles, bones and flesh? No, you don't know how consciously, but there is a wisdom within you that does know.”

KnowsDoeBodyFaithKnow HowAirDirectBonesFleshYour BodyMusclesDo You KnowWithin YouLungsAssimilationMetabolism
Book:DAILY POWER for JOYFUL LIVING
Create image