Jenji Kohan Quotes

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

The Melting Pot

The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox but the ox becomes a lion.

If you read Herodotus, the first Greek historian 2,500 years ago, he was talking about that - about people mixing with other people. Sometimes it produces great societies. Sometimes it triggers war. But, we're not going to change that. I don't think so. We're living in nations that are state nations and countries.

I believe all societies, all thriving societies of the future are going to be multicultural societies.

I suppose our lives need to be more integrated. We have white communities and black communities and white country clubs and black country clubs. It's very important when we integrate ourselves, and it helps us to have a better understanding of the world, to people all over the world and this is the time in history that we have become very aware of how important that is, so I think it's just really-we have to know each other and work together and play together in order to write about each other.

I loved this idea of always being a foreigner. There's this thing where people bring cultures, bring the music together. I love it when the music, when the cultures collide and something sort of new comes out of it.

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.

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

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.

Latinas who come to the U.S. should adapt, learn English and become a part of the community.

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.

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?

In grade school I was taught that the United States is a melting pot. People from all over the world come here for freedom and to pursue a better life. They arrive with next to nothing, work incredibly hard, learn a new language and new customs, and in a generation they become an integral part of our amazing nation.

'Lollipop Opera' is the backdrop to Finsbury Park. A place that is very thriving, interracial and lot of music stores, Greek, Turkish, all sorts of immigrant music. It's utter Englishness. It blends the Jamaicans, the Irish. It's like what Jim Reeves did with American country music.

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.

Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.

As to other foreigners it is thought better to discourage their settling together in large masses, wherein, as in our German settlements, they preserve for a long time their own languages, habits, and principles of government, and that they should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation.

Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules.

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

Our nation has been called a melting pot. I think of it more as a mosaic, one to which many groups make their own distinct contributions.

The melting pot has sprung a leak.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

There are men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there upon the [Hudson] river.

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.