Melting Pot Quotes

• We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

  Jimmy Carter

  Beautiful, Dream, America

  Speech, Pittsburgh, Pa., 27 Oct. 1976

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• 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.

  Philip Glass

  Travel, Mean, America

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• 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

  Dream, Mean, Humble

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan)., Ronald Reagan, United States. Office of the Federal Register (1982). “Ronald Reagan”

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• America is a melting pot of immigrants. So actually, if you took all of the immigrants outside of America, you'd be missing a lot of flavor, starting with the food, with the culture, with the dance, with everything.

  Wyclef Jean

  America, Missing, Culture

  "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. September 25, 2012.

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• I hear that melting pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

  Jesse Jackson

  Justice, Diversity, Political

  Quoted in Playboy, Nov. 1969

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• Every now and then, you get people who tend to forget what this country is about, which is a melting pot of races and cultures and freedom of speech.

  Maynard James Keenan

  Country, Race, People

  "The Tool Man: Blistering Band's Frontman Puts His Mind to the World's Problems". The San Diego Union-Tribune, October 25, 2001.

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• 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

  Wise, Men, Thinking

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

  Woodrow Wilson

  Precious Metal, Compounds, Metals

  Woodrow Wilson (1916). “Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson: Extracts from the Public Speeches of the Leader and Interpreter of American Democracy, with Masterpieces of Eloquence”, Best Books

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• 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 Elliott

  Country, Vegetables, Differences

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• 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.

  Jeff Hawkins

  School, People, United States

  "America’s Shameful Moments" by Jeff Hawkins, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 24, 2011.

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• 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

  Mean, Light, Becoming One

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• 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

  Acceptance, America, Culture

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• 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

  Nice, Ideas, Melting

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• America's a melting pot, all races, cultures, religious choices.

  Tiger Woods

  Religious, America, Race

  "The remarkable drive of Tiger Woods". www.cnn.com.

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• America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron.

  Barbara Mikulski

  America, Melting, Pot

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• Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards

  Eric Holder

  Believe, Coward, Melting

  Speech at the DOJ African-American History Month Program, delivered 18 February 2009

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• The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

  Thurgood Marshall

  Freedom, Men, Black History

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

  Israel Zangwill

  Race, Europe, America

  The Melting-Pot act 1 (1908). This passage popularized the term melting pot in the sense of an amalgamation of peoples (the jstor database shows that an earlier usage with this meaning occurs in the American Journal of Sociology, July 1906, and a reference to public education as a "melting-pot" for immigrants appears in the Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1891). See Baudouin 1; Jimmy Carter 3; Crevecoeur 1; Ellison 2; Hayward 1; Jesse Jackson 1

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• 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

  Minorities, Melting, Pot

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• Everyone should be proud of who they are and where they come from because America is a big melting pot of diverse ethnicities. It's great to be part of this wonderful country.

  Rima Fakih

  Country, Ethnicity, America

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• The melting-pot idea is futile ... The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Ideas, United States, Boiling Over

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• Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.

  Bob Cousy

  Basketball, Race, Issues

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• 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

  Thanksgiving, Holiday, Thinking

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• In the melting pot that is America, inclusive trumps exclusive. Whether it's single women, young adults, or minorities, alienating the rapidly growing voting blocs is not smart politics.

  Eliot Spitzer

  Smart, America, Voting

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• 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

  Writing, People, Doe

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