However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment.
Interpretation
True assimilation requires more than superficial adherence to norms; it demands a deep emotional and intellectual connection to the culture.
In this quote, Louis D. Brandeis emphasizes that mere outward conformity to American customs is insufficient for an immigrant to truly be considered Americanized. He argues that an immigrant must not only adopt the surface-level aspects of the culture but also develop a profound personal investment in its values and aspirations, actively participating in the collective journey towards achieving these ideals.
In practice
In a speech about immigration policy, a leader could use this quote to emphasize the importance of cultural integration.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty... that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
When those of Jewish blood exhibit moral or intellectual superiority, genius or special talent, we feel pride in them, even if they have abjured the faith like Spinoza, Marx, Disraeli or Heine. Despite the meditations of pundits or the decrees of council, our own instincts and acts, and those of others, have defined for us the term 'Jew.'
In business, the earning of profit is something more than an incident of success. It is an essential condition of success. It is an essential condition of success because the continued absence of profit itself spells failure.
America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.
When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.
If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.
People are incorrigibly themselves.
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
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