Michael Moorcock Quotes

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.

Traditionally, the ideology of the United States nationhood perpetuated the myth that immigrants would shed their particularistic ethnic identities and loyalties. Eventually these “strangers” would be assimilated into a homogeneous body politic that was based on the equality of individual rights.

America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.

We focus so much on how immigrants can change America that we forget that America has always changed immigrants even more.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

American literature has always been immigrant.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

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

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

No encouragement must be given to social and political organizations or methods which perpetuate in this country foreign ideas and customs. An Irish-American, a German-American, or a French-American vote is an intolerable anomaly.

The unifying characteristics that make us Americans are becoming more and more diluted now because new immigrants want to set up ethnic enclaves to retain their culture and language.

Part of America's genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shore.

To become an American is a process which resembles a conversion. It is not so much a new country that one adopts as a new creed.

I'm a first-generation kid in this country. I so identify with America and its culture. I'm a citizen, I was born here. I'm American. At the same time, like most first-generation kids, I have this other identity to another country back home, which is India.

The American identity is mind-bogglingly various.

I've always seen myself as an all-American kid, you know. You're not just white or black or Asian or Latino. We're in the melting pot of America.

I've always had a complex relationship towards my identity as an American.

A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

One of the defining characteristics or difference between today's illegal immigration and the immigration of old is the immigrants of the late 1800s through the early 1920s came here desiring to become Americans. They wanted to become part of what was a unique and distinct American culture. They were all coming from tyranny of one kind or another.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

People from all over the world came to America and assimilated into a single culture rooted in the founding, which is rooted in individual liberty and primacy of citizen over government. Everybody who came here, that's what drew them.