Melting Pot Quotes

America is a melting pot for all different groups of people, historically. And it's rare that the story of all of these people will be told in the history books. So I always felt I had to find out my history for myself and research my roots. ~ Nas

Some years ago I said in an opinion that if this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-Americans didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down. ~ Thurgood Marshall

We don't need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables - the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers - to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences. ~ Jane Elliot

I think Hollywood is so driven by money, the people who are making the decisions are not necessarily reflective of the melting pot, so what stories are you going to want to tell? You're going to want to tell stories about yourself. ~ Sanaa Lathan

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

I grew up in such a melting pot. There's more ethnicities in Queens than there is in any place on the planet. So you grow up knowing things about other cultures. ~ Action Bronson

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

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

For me, personally, Detroit is a melting pot for everything. We get the best from the East Coast, West Coast and down South. ~ Big Sean

Although the film industry is a very unique melting pot of creative and business types, both for the good and the bad, I love being able to wake up everyday to play. ~ Kyle Cassie

I feel like I need to speak out, because if no one speaks out, if no one says, this is me, this is what I believe in, and this is why I'm different, and this is why that's okay, then what's the point? What's the point of living in this beautiful, great melting pot where everyone can dare be anything they want to be? ~ Sandhya Menon

My schools were quite diverse - those who serve their country come from every race and religion - and so the military schools I attended were a wonderful melting pot. ~ Marcia Gay Harden

I love that New York City is a true melting pot. ~ Stephanie Szostak

I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like? ~ Al Pacino

Liberalism is the ideology at the center of conservative arguments against affirmative action and equal opportunity. By proposing that, all things being equal, everyone has the same opportunity to compete in the U.S. marketplace, success is determined by how hard someone works and not by their economic class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race. Ethnic and racial identities are to be assimilated, lost, and erased through the celebrated "melting pot" of U.S. culture. Liberalism thus devalues the importance of communitarian experiences and social identities as determinants or barriers to individual success. Instead, it proposes that all individuals are fundamentally equal and that, regardless of their social identity, everyone can control his or her fate through hard work, learned skills, and acquired education- the foundational myth of a U.S. meritocracy. ~ Isabel Molina-Guzman

Moving to Los Angeles and working in places like Hawaii, you get to experience a true melting pot. It's really nice to be around people who are multiethnic. ~ Ian Anthony Dale

This country isn't a melting pot. Think of this country as a stir fry. That's what this country should be. A place where people are appreciated for who they are. ~ Jane Elliott

We live in a melting pot. More and more, people are some kind of mixture. Even if you're Caucasian, you're a mixture of something. ~ Brooklyn Sudano

While Mumbai is a melting pot of cultures, Delhi is made of community, and we can see these lines quite clearly. An aunty from Punjabi Bagh will be different from a Faridabad aunty or an aunty from Vasant Kunj. ~ Vir Das

Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity
an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

Mainstream is the melting pot of everybody sometimes for much of its faults and triumphs it's the world out there that reveals so much more about you than the man-made boundaries that are created. ~ Paul Isaacs

We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted. ~ Wynton Marsalis

There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality. ~ Woodrow Wilson

America, it has been observed, is not really a melting pot. It is actually a huge potluck dinner, in which platters of roasted chicken beckon beside casseroles of pasta, mounds of tortillas, stew pots of gumbo, and skillets filled with pilafs of every imaginable color. ~ Andrea Chesman

America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! ~ Israel Zangwill

The question that has perhaps divided students of vouchers more than any other is their likely effect on the social and economic class structure. Some have argued that the great value of the public school has been as a melting pot, in which rich and poor, native- and foreign-born, black and white have learned to live together. That image was and is largely true for small communities, but almost entirely false for large cities. There, the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location. It is no accident that most of the country's outstanding public schools are in high-income enclaves. ~ Milton Friedman

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali
a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Seattle is like a global gumbo, a melting pot with all kinds of people - the rich, the poor, white people, some Chinese, Filipino, Jewish and black people - they're all here. ~ Quincy Jones

There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse. It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature's way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the Lions!

Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die. The King is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We must therefore go back to Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the Lions!

Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions. Nature herself may be trusted to do this, if only we will leave her alone. But what of those who, physically fitted to live, are tainted with rottenness of soul, cancerous with the sin-complex? For the third time I answer: The Christians to the Lions!

Hadit calls himself the Star, the Star being the Unit of the Macrocosm; and the Snake, the Snake being the symbol of Going or Love, the Dwarf-Soul, the Spermato ~ Aleister Crowley

It's a melting pot, southern Africa. You find these cultural collisions that result in art and music, and it's pretty amazing. ~ Dave Matthews

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

I live in Brooklyn, New York. It is a melting pot of cultures and people. I walk down the street, and there is art on the buildings and people congregating who have been neighbors for years and events and music and freedom. ~ Erin Willett

I really feel that I had a genuinely diverse, multicultural upbringing, and I just don't find New York to be quite as diverse. Maybe I'm romanticising, but I feel that I was exposed to a real melting pot in terms of culture and pop culture. My kids are essentially middle-class, but I do try to remind them that they come from humble beginnings. ~ Carmen Ejogo

You, the Spirit of the Settlement! ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries ... ~ Israel Zangwill

Here's an idea: How about just 'Americans?' That has a nice ring to it, if you ask me. Placing undue emphasis on our 'separateness' is a step backward. Bring back the melting pot. ~ Bobby Jindal

Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer. ~ Lionel Richie

I'm a melting pot of frienship. ~ Ghost

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

I don't think any other holiday embraces the food of the Midwest quite like Thanksgiving. There's roasted meat and mashed potatoes. But being here is also about heritage. Cleveland is really a giant melting pot - not only is my family a melting pot, but so is the city. ~ Michael Symon

I grew up about 30 minutes north of Boston in a town that was a virtual melting pot - I was exposed to all different backgrounds, cultures, and religions, fueling my personal interests in global issues. ~ Alex Newell

That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt. ~ Wally Lamb

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

In adapting to life in the melting pot of America, I discovered that the same soft power of science has a huge influence in building bridges between cultures and religions - and has the potential to do so with the Muslim world. ~ Ahmed Zewail

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

Queens, New York. The most ethnically diverse region not just in the United States, but on the entire planet ... In Queens, you will find Korean kids who sound like black kids. Italians who sound like Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans who sound like Italians. Third-generation Irish who sound like old Jews. That's Queens. Not a melting pot, not even a tossed salad, but an all-you-can-eat, mix-and-match buffet. ~ Victor LaValle

Devils used to be God's angels that fell from the top. There is no diversity cos we're burnin in the melting pot. ~ Immortal Technique

Denmark is a small, homogenous nation of about 5.5 million people. The United States is a melting pot of more than 315 million people. No question about it, Denmark and the United States are very different countries. ~ Bernie Sanders

But, frankly, to try to create some sort of a religious standard in terms of who can come to America, we're a melting pot. And as long as people have positive and good intent, they ought to be able to come. ~ John Kasich

It is the prerogative of night, when thoughts, like relentless waves, break on the impressionable sands of the mind. Questions, theories, and suppositions come crashing ashore, and just like waves, they disappear into the grains of the mind without a trace. In this sea of uncertainty, stormed by nocturnal nightmares, the mind slips in and out of consciousness. It is the melting pot where logic and fantasy combine until supposition becomes hypothesis and hypothesis morphs into unsubstantiated fact. ~ Luke Gracias

We're this big melting pot, but someone turned up the heat too high, and the stew started to burn. Gangs, crime, fights, and fear are now a regular part of our local stew. ~ Neal Shusterman

Houston is kind of a melting pot. There are many different cultures and ethnicities represented out there. ~ J. J. Watt

Here, in this waiting room, one could see a cross section of them - the hoppers, the creepers, the crawlers, the wrigglers, and rollers that came from the many planets, from so many stars. Earth was the galactic melting pot, he thought, a place where beings from the thousand stars met and mingled to share their thoughts and cultures. ~ Clifford D. Simak

When these images clash - as in The Fascist octupus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot - it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. ~ George Orwell

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

a melting pot. It's more like one of those divided metal plates with separate sections for starch, meat, and veggies. I'm looking at him and he's still not looking ~ Nicola Yoon

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

In Florida, we're the best melting pot in the world. We love everybody coming to our state. ~ Rick Scott

I come from the South Bronx - a true descendant of the melting pot. I grew up in a really mixed neighborhood; it was a very integrated life. ~ Al Pacino

Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans. ~ Ami Bera

America's not really a melting pot. It's more like one of those divided metal plates with separate sections for starch, meat, and veggies. ~ Nicola Yoon

Canada is not a melting-pot. Canada is an association of peoples who have, and cherish, great differences but who work together because they can respect themselves and each other. ~ Vincent Massey

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

My theory is because I'm Asian and white I sort of look like the future. I'm the melting pot. ~ Moon Bloodgood

Ukraine is a vital link for Europe: our energy transportation networks; our location between the European Union and Eurasia. We're the melting pot of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. The democracy we founded with the Orange Revolution has to be an example for other post-Soviet states. ~ Yulia Tymoshenko

Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall. ~ Ralph Ellison

We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaid. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams. ~ Jimmy Carter

Honolulu is a melting pot. ~ Bruno Mars

America is no longer the melting pot it used to be. It has now become a tossed salad of foreigners that arrive to our shores wanting to keep their culture and forcing our acceptance. ~ Jay Severin

She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was ... (He touches the coffin) ... not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania - and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. ~ Tony Kushner

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

Only in the early twentieth century, after years in the Protestant melting pot, was the theological concept of "Land of Israel" finally converted and refined into a clearly geonational concept. Settlement Zionism borrowed the term from the rabbinical tradition in part to displace the term "Palestine, ~ Shlomo Sand

Online is such an important platform ... it's all one giant melting pot of talents. The times are changing. It's just art now. You can share your audiences with everyone, and it's exciting. ~ Lindsey Stirling

Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all. ~ Esperanza Spalding

The Midwest is a musical melting pot and the source and birthplace of several musical genres. ~ Chuck Inglish

So that's what we want is a secure and sovereign nation and, you know, I don't know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me. I don't know that. [Note: its the Hispanic Student Union. The whole room is Hispanic teenagers.] What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that. I'm evidence of that. I've been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly. ~ Sharron Angle

America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody. ~ Eric Ripert

There's a lot to love about America - freedom, the melting pot of diversity, individualism - all attractive concepts, especially to an introvert. In fact, the introverts were probably the first to feel crowded in England and to daydream about all the space they would find in the New World. Peace! Quiet! ~ Laurie Helgoe

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

Death is ... a travelling asunder into elemental chaos. And from the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore death also is but a cul-de-sac, a melting-pot. ~ D.H. Lawrence

We are able to choose what we want - you don't have to accept one thing from one tradition. It's a melting pot. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Not only is New York City the nation's melting pot, it is also the casserole, the chafing dish and the charcoal grill. ~ John Lindsay

I confess that during the citizenship application process the founding principles of this country have grown on me. I have come to believe in the ideal that "We the People" can come together "to form a more perfect Union". The United States represent the most awesome social experiment in the world - a melting pot of cultures, united behind the idea of living free in a democratic Republic. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum. ~ Anna Quindlen

Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California. ~ Michael Connelly

America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top. ~ Charlie King

I'm always looking for those places where you can slam really disparate people up against one another, and they have to deal with each other. There are very few crossroads anymore. We talk about this country as this big melting pot, but it's a mosaic. There's all these pieces, they're next to each other, they're not necessarily mixing. And I'm looking for those spaces where people actually do mix. ~ Jenji Kohan

I think men get nervous when women start counting the number of female senators, and whites become edgy when they hear the next Supreme Court seat will probably go to a Latino. This isn't always because they object to sharing the spoils, by the way; it just reminds us that the melting pot may not be working, and we haven't yet achieved the ambiguous national dream of becoming a nation of indistinguishable beige atheists. ~ Dahlia Lithwick

Finally, Europe's post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities - particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna - were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe' was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms - but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities the Jews in France, for example - represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugos ~ Tony Judt

I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York. ~ Johnny Depp

I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It's basically a mini-country unto itself. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don't know each other, and they don't know each other because they don't communicate with each other, and they don't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Second, there is something insidiously pathological about the melting pot concept in its assumption that groups should assimilate. Wehrly states, "Cultural assimilation, as practiced in the United States, is the expectation by the people in power that all immigrants and people outside the dominant group will give up their ethnic and cultural values and will adopt the values and norms of the dominant society - the White, male Euro-Americans" (1995, p. 5). Many psychologists of color, however, have referred to this process as cultural genocide, an outcome of colonial thought (Guthrie, 1997; Thomas & Sillen, 1972). ~ Derald Wing Sue

One of the things I most admire about America is they have created a genuine melting pot society, a country of opportunity; you can be of any religion, colour, ethnicity, persuasion and make it to the top of your chosen field. And that's something I admire about America and hope they continue with. ~ David Cameron

It sounds stupid, but there's nothing like walking down the street and seeing a building that's older than 100 years old. I think London - not to sound pretentious - like New York, it's a big melting pot for all things and it's just got this energy that you can't find anywhere else. ~ Christian Cooke

I have the utmost respect for those who have come to this country legally and have contributed to the great melting pot that is America today. But those who have crossed our borders illegally have broken the law and the law ought to be enforced. ~ Bob Ney

Genres aren't that relevant. Nearly every form of music is a melting pot of things of things. ~ Jacob Bannon

New Orleans has a unique history as a great melting pot of all kinds of cultures, and that manifests itself now through the food, the music, and the kinds of people who live there. ~ Scott Bakula

I love Caribbean food. It's a great melting pot of so many cultures including the Native Americans. ~ Bob Greene

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War ii for no really good reason by our most liberal president. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slave like inequalities. ~ Theodore Hesburgh

America in general is much more of a melting pot than anywhere in Europe, I think. Europe has a lot of different nationalities in each country, of course, but they never really seem to melt together. You can move to Germany, but you never really become a German. The same is very true of France, and I have been living there since the age of two. In America anyone can become a true American. ~ Jane L. Rosen