These melting pot quotes will inspire you. The melting pot is a monocultural metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, the different elements “melting together” with a common culture; an alternative being a homogeneous society becoming more heterogeneous through the influx of foreign elements with different cultural backgrounds, possessing the potential to create disharmony within the previous culture.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging melting pot quotes, melting pot sayings, and melting pot proverbs.
Best 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
- “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
- “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
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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
- “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
- “There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.” ~ Woodrow Wilson
- “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
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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
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“America’s a melting pot, all races, cultures, religious choices.” ~ Tiger Woods
- “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
- “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
- “America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron.” ~ Barbara Mikulski
- “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
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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
- “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
- “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
- “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
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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
- “We know longer live in a homogenous society, it is not black, white, Asian or Latin, it is a melting pot. Until we learn to assimilate and learn about other cultures, we will continue to have racism problems. Of course, there are other ‘-isms’ as our ills. We have sexism, ageism, elitism, homophobia-ism, there are many -isms we have to overcome.” ~ Octavia Spencer
- “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
- “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
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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
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“My family is just an amazing melting pot of wonderful religions and faiths.” ~ Rima Fakih
- “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
- “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
- “Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.” ~ Tom Wolfe
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“Honolulu is a melting pot.” ~ Bruno Mars
- “Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.” ~ Langston Hughes
- “Of course I’m a black writer… I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.” ~ Toni Morrison
- “Israel is a very young country, a cultural melting pot, and unlike the structured life of the Orthodox Jews, I grew up in a non-religious part of society where people were totally open to new experiences on many levels. I learned that when things are missing, you invent them.” ~ Noma Bar
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“By growing up in Alabama, I had a melting pot of the whole pie: R&B, gospel, country.” ~ Lionel Richie
- “America always put forth this phony melting pot theory, but it’s a reality now. They couldn’t accomplish the melting pot economically; they couldn’t accomplish it politically, or through education and science. But America has become a consumer society, and I see young people in the cities – of all colors and races – hanging out together over consumerism.” ~ Russell Means
- “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
- “So, in “Melting Pot” the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, “America was the new world and Europe was the old,” in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.” ~ Tim Wise
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“The melting-pot idea is futile … The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over.” ~ Pearl S. Buck
- “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
- “Since the 1960s, we have seen the failure of the melting pot ideology. This ideology suggested that different historical, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds could be subordinated to a larger ideology or social amalgam which is “America.” This concept obviously did not work, because paradoxically America encourages a politics of contestation.” ~ Edward Said
- “I see people getting so caught up in celebrating diversity that they are neglecting their commonality. I don’t see this as a good thing. The Chinese culture has survived for more than five thousand years in part because the Chinese have embraced the same language and culture. I hope I am wrong about this, and that the flame is still on beneath the great American melting pot. Americans need each other, and a house divided, no matter the color of its occupants, is still divided. And divided we all fall.” ~ Richard Paul Evans
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“Genres aren’t that relevant. Nearly every form of music is a melting pot of things of things.” ~ Jacob Bannon
- “I just had a thought that perhaps religion is so vibrant here is because of the melting pot aspect to our society. WE have so many cultures here in the US and they all bring something new to their religious experiences.” ~ Sally Quinn
- “Stop and think of what happened in America. The melting pot, yeah, it happened. Stop and think of what happened, from the first days of the founding. You have to go back to the Pilgrims. You have to include the Pilgrims in the founding. Why they came. What they learned on the way. What they learned after they got here. The Pilgrims, like everybody else, tried to establish a socialist collective. Bombed out. Didn’t work. We know this, the governor wrote about it himself, William Bradford.” ~ Rush Limbaugh
- “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
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“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
- “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
- “We are sufficiently conscious of this dimension or quality of Brazil as a melting pot, as a culture and a nation that is being subjected to an amalgamating process. More than just a mixing process, it is an amalgamation where the fragments, the parts in collision, really interact profoundly. They become another thing after the contact.” ~ Gilberto Gil
- “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
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“My theory is because I’m Asian and white I sort of look like the future. I’m the melting pot.” ~ Moon Bloodgood
- “The British are so funny. It’s like they can’t believe I lived in Hackney. ‘You could live in Bondi Beach. Why would you want to live in ‘Ackney?’ But Hackney’s fantastic. I’m serious. There are so many artists there. I loved the markets, the parks, the pubs, the diversity. It was a cultural melting-pot.” ~ Rose Byrne
- “The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot.” ~ James Jeans
- “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
- “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
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“Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all.” ~ Esperanza Spalding
- “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
- “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
- “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. 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
- “The United Nations is an organizational body where people, through their Governments, come together; and it can be the only place where there can be a melting pot.” ~ Asma Jahangir
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“I think of L.A. as truly the melting pot. It’s basically a mini country unto itself.” ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong
- “Death is … a traveling 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
- “The thing I love about Vegas is that it’s a melting pot. It’s like working Ellis Island.” ~ Don Rickles
