American Melting Pot Quotes & Sayings

I definitely want to go on acting for as long as I can find employment. I'm never happier than when I'm on a film set. I just want to keep working. — Daniel Radcliffe

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence. — Bruce Chatwin

If a government commission had worked on the horse, you would have the first horse that could operate its knee joint in both directions. The trouble is it couldn't have stood up. — Peter Drucker

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well. — Matthew Rhys

Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick J. Buchanan hates. — David Denby

On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why? — Gurinder Chadha

The American movie, in part because America's a melting pot, the cultural hodgepodge that America makes, generates movies that have appeal across all international boundaries. And that's really not true for most domestic film industries. It's no longer true of France and Italy, less true than it used to be of the U.K. — Howard Stringer

Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it's therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it's much too dangerous. — Noam Chomsky

Being a melting pot is what I think is great about being American, and also that we get to do something that other people don't get to do, we get to be a hyphenate. That's a good thing. — Keegan-Michael Key

Only in the case of the Negro has the melting pot failed to bring a minority into the full stream of American life. — John F. Kennedy

America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination. — Ivan Krastev

The church has lost the chance of becoming the unifying element in our American society. It is not anticipating any facts. It is merely catching up very slowly to the new social facts created by economic and other forces. The American melting pot is doing its work. The churches merely represent various European cultures, lost in the amalgam of American life and maintaining a separate existence only in religion. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive. — Carolyn Wells

Hollywood is a symbol of global movies, it's not just American movies. It's become a platform and a melting pot; it's for all the talents and capital from all over the globe. — Bruno Zheng Wu

That strange conflict in the American character: we pride ourselves on being the melting pot of the world but we insist on regarding most immigrants with suspicion. — Gene Tierney

Americanization means the process of becoming an American. It means civic incorporation, becoming a part of the polity - becoming one of us. But that does not mean conformity. We are more than a melting pot, we are a kaleidoscope, where every turn of history refracts new light on the old promise. — Barbara Jordan

America is a melting pot, and education has been a mainspring for our democracy and freedom, a means of providing gifts of knowledge and opportunity to all citizens, no matter how humble their background, so they could climb higher, help build the American dream, and leave a better life for those who follow. — Ronald Reagan

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche. — Toni Morrison

The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. . . .The point about the melting pot. . . is that it did not happen. — David L. Sills

The resulting amalgam - an exotic mixture of European, Caribbean, African, and American elements - made Louisiana into perhaps the most seething ethnic melting pot that the nineteenth century world could produce. This cultural gumbo would serve as breeding ground for many of the great hybrid musics of modern times; not just jazz, but also cajun, zydeco, blues, and other new styles flourished as a result of this laissez-faire environment. In this warm, moist atmosphere, sharp delineations between cultures gradually softened and ultimately disappeared. — Ted Gioia

I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much? — Mel Brooks

We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. — Anonymous

It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian ... Or becoming a Negro for four years. — Josh Alan Friedman

To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more. — Ernest Istook

To be American is to long for whatever our parents fled. — Colin Quinn

Integration my undead ass. Did they teach you about the Great American Melting Pot in grade school?" she asked. "Some of us don't like the idea of being melted down and blended into stew for the rest of you to devour. — Jim C. Hines

Hawai'i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a 'mixed plate'
a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi. Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely 'local' cuisine. This is also, I believe, what America is at its best
a whole greater than the sum of it's parts. — Alan Brennert

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. — Simone Weil

You may think you are harming others and some of you take pleasure in this, but in reality you are harming yourself hundreds of times more than you have harmed anyone else. — Khorshed Bhavnagri