Assimilation Quotes

“It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.

Ignorance is our deepest secret.

And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.

Here is a quick test:

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.

Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.

It will do both of you good.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.”
― Norman Manea

“Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Your life can be different, Young Ju. Study and be strong. In America, women have choices.”
― An Na, A Step from Heaven

“Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”
― William McKinley

“It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan.

You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.”
― S. J. Parris (Heresy: An Historical Thriller), Heresy

“Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them?”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“Oneness is the supreme truth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Divane Dynamite: Only truth in the cosmos is love

“On winter nights he, who had never slept beneath more than a sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and felt like a figure in an ancient myth, condemned by the gods to have a boulder pressing down upon his chest; but never mind, he would be English, even if his classmates giggled at his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because these exclusions only increased his determination, and that was when he began to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“...lies...drive immigrants, and people of color...to change who we are in order to make us palatable, or at least tolerable, to white America. I didn't find freedom in assimilation because there is no freedom in racist ideas. Assimilation requires that the story we tell about the United States and about white people is an uplifting, inspiring, sugarcoated version of the facts, in which the whip, guns, and racist motives must remain hidden. But it was the truth about this country, the knowledge of its ugly dirty secrets, that set me free.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“I've learned that Mexicans, our Indigenous ancestors, have always had a footprint in this land. We have many examples to follow of people who resisted assimilation, who fought for equality. We must shine a light on those who came before us, those who showed us decades ago that we are enough. Through them, I have learned this is where I belong, not because white people accept me, but because the same roots that ground me to Mexico ground me here, too.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“These nativists—these racists—imagine a U.S. utopia of white people that has never existed. We've been here. Mexicans, and more broadly Latinos, have have never invaded Texas. Our land was stolen, and now we're the ones who are viewed as thieves. White supremacy doesn't care if we are here legally, or if we were born here, or if our families have roots in America dating back centuries, perhaps even longer than theirs. The fear many white people have is not whether we will assimilate, but whether our Latino bodies, and those of our children, will roam this land.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“We are finally seeing that success doesn't have to happen outside our community or in spite of our heritage. We are rejecting the notion that success is found in whiteness because that kind of thinking has never led us anywhere good. The antidote for the poison of the oppressor is to embrace our brownness, because it is our culture that is propelling us.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“This Booker T. Washington syndrome permeated every aspect of the education I received in Birmingham. Work hard and you will be rewarded. A corollary of this principle was that the road would be harder and rockier for Black people than for their white counterparts. Our teachers warned us that we would have to steel ourselves for hard labor and more hard labor, sacrifices and more sacrifices. Only this would prove that we were serious about overcoming all the obstacles before us. It often struck me they were speaking of these obstacles as if they would always be there, part of the natural order of things, rather than the product of a system of racism, which we could eventually overturn.”
― Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography

“The opposite of intolerance is not toleration, the opposite of intolerance is assimilation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“I was a fake, someone who had not chosen to remember her roots and someone who had chosen to assimilate. In my rush to learn what I thought I had to in order to fit in abroad, I risked feeling left out at home.”
― Tiara McKinney

“When the mind is one piece, there will be peace of mind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat

“I am not a person, prison or path, for I am vicdan,
I'm saadet, my friend, I am the spirit of unification.
Call the sun as you like, it still brightens the world,
In the domain of realization, to label is desecration.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting

“A promise was once made,
He asked me to unify the world.
Ever since, I have been on duty,
My life isn't mine but of the world.
If I fail, you cross off one human.
If I succeed, you witness civilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz

“Brahma Yoga knows that deep within, I am a conscious being living consciously, and this knowledge brings me absolute assimilation”
― Leo Lourdes, A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“I am but a farmer of assimilation, and I know,
I won't get to see the saplings turn savannah.
But someday humankind will stand up and say,
Glory be to them, who toiled for our humanistana!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown

“Naskar is the outcome of such churning.
When all cultures come together, Naskar is born.
Call it Naskar, call it Human - all the same,
It all represents the undivided spirit of dawn.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“World Integration Day
(9th October Sonnet)

When I am gone,

Celebrate not October 9th,
as the day Naskar was born.
Celebrate it if you so desire,
as the World Day of Integration.

Tie a bracelet of assimilation,
amongst buddies across culture.
Pledge to have each other's back,
even if deemed tradition's traitor.

Mark you, one day is not enough,
to live as an integration advocate.
But the journey of a million miles,
must begin with one bold step.

Live each day of your life,
as proof of love and oneness.
Cause inclusion defying prejudice,
You are the cure for divisiveness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“Live each day of your life,
as proof of love and oneness.
Cause inclusion defying prejudice,
You are the cure for divisiveness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“When I am gone,

Celebrate not October 9th,
as the day Naskar was born.
Celebrate it if you so desire,
as the World Day of Integration.

Tie a bracelet of assimilation,
amongst buddies across culture.
Pledge to have each other's back,
even if deemed tradition's traitor.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth