Walt Whitman Quotes

Not merely a nation but a nation of nations.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

The Melting Pot

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali -- a collection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each may not mix with the next, but they combine on your palate to produce a satisfying repast.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one.

America is White and Black and Latino and Asian. America is mixed. America is immigrants.

The unity in diversity of the United States is one of the country's greatest strengths.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

We are the only country in the world that has taken people from so many different backgrounds, which is a great achievement by itself, but an even greater achievement is that we have turned all of that variety and diversity into unity.

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

America was born as a nation of immigrants who have always contributed to its greatness.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

To be an American is to be part of the world because America, all the people of the world come to America.

I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.

In a multi-racial society, trust, understanding and tolerance are the cornerstones of peace and order

Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting.

The melting pot was always a tension between difference and sameness.

I come from a nation of peoples drawn from all around the world.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

… mongrel nation

The ancients knew of no nations that could fuse many discordant elements into one society.

This is a country where Jews and Arabs speak without fear. Where people come from different cultures the world over. Where everyone becomes Brazilian rapidly.

We, in the United States, are a melting-pot and, by being so, we have demonstrated that peoples can get along together irrespective of race, color or creed. Using the ‘melting-pot’ or some such catch phrase for a theme we might be able to use the Met [Metropolitan Opera Company] as an example of how Europeans can get along together in the United States and that, therefore, some sort of European Federation is entirely practicable.

The pluralism of India has been the shaping force of our democracy.