“It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.

Ignorance is our deepest secret.

And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.

Here is a quick test:

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.

Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.

It will do both of you good.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Poetry that emerges from a poet’s mind becomes complete only when it enters into the reader’s sphere of comprehension.”
― Suman Pokhrel, भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]

“The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.”
― Norman Manea

“Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“Poetry emerging from a poet enters into the reader only when it comes within the readers’ 'sphere of intellect. A reader cannot take poetry by expanding it beyond his/her consciousness, rather can take by shrinking it within. Thus, there exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation.”
― Suman Pokhrel, भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]

“The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Your life can be different, Young Ju. Study and be strong. In America, women have choices.”
― An Na, A Step from Heaven

“He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“कविता कविबाट निस्किएर पाठकमा प्रवेश गरेपछि पाठकको चेतनावृत्तमा समाहित हुन्छ । एउटा पाठकले कवितालाई आफ्नो चेतनाभन्दा बाहिर फैल्याएर ग्रहण गर्न सक्दैन, बरू खुम्च्याएर गर्न सक्छ । यसो हुने हुनाले प्रत्येक कविता हरेक पाठकमा पुग्दा कुनै न कुनै रूपमा फेरिएर पुग्ने सम्भावना सँधै रहिरहेको हुन्छ । यो ‘फेरिनु’ प्रकारान्तरले अनूदित हुनु नै हो । त्यसैले कविताको प्रत्येक बुझाइ एउटा अनुवाद हो ।”
― Suman Pokhrel, भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]

“पाठकले कवितालाई आफ्नो चेतनाभन्दा बाहिर फैल्याएर ग्रहण गर्न सक्दैन, बरू खुम्च्याएर गर्न सक्छ ।”
― Suman Pokhrel, भारत शाश्वत आवाज [Bharat Shashwat Aawaz]

“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”
― William McKinley

“It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan.

You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.”
― S. J. Parris (Heresy: An Historical Thriller), Heresy

“Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them?”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. Later, I understood that we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future -- that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn't fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“The refugee's heart often grows
an outer layer. An assimilation.
It cocoons the organ. Those unable to grow the extra skin
die within the first six months in a host country.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“A refugee must learn to be anything people want her to be at any given moment. But behind the masks, I am only myself - a mosaic of flavors from near and far.”
― Chantha Nguon, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

“The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate. Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion - disappear!”
― Natasha Brown, Assembly

“Hz. Muhammad, Hz. Isa (Jesus), Hz. Mevlana, or Hz. Naskar - the message comes in many forms, but the message itself is one and the same - it's the message of love, not hate - it's the message of assimilation, not dissimilation - it's the message of peace, not pieces.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One

“Assimilate all, alienate none.
Be the unbent explorer of illumination.
Be the pilgrim of living piety,
Celestial passenger you, go find a mirror!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“Discrimination is only symptom, distance is the culprit.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yüz Şiirlerin Yüzüğü (Ring of 100 Poems, Bilingual Edition): 100 Turkish Poems with Translations

“There's a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience. As a teenager, I busied myself with the school newspaper or debate club because, unlike with math or science, I thought I could actually get better at these things. You flip through your father's old physics notebooks, and you know in your bones that these formulas and graphs will never make sense to you. But one day, you realize that your parents speak with a mild accent, and that they have no idea what passive voice is. The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf -- one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Forgetting head, heritage 'n sanity,
I have placed you heartmidst.
I know not much prayer nor poetry;
When heart is frozen, all prayer is amiss.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One

“There is no five elements, only one, love.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“So the government tried a new tool, separating children from their families and cultures, sending them far away to school, long enough, they hoped, to make them forget who they were.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Many minds, many lanes.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“When you stand in front of a person, empty your cup and stand as a mirror. Let them pour all their hopes and dreams, their passions, their purpose, their tragedies, their triumphs, their culture, their language, everything - let them pour everything that they are, into you. Become so profoundly empty of yourself, that everyone can see themselves in you - become a mirror to the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“Everywhere is home, everyone is family.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown