Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
ATTRIBUTION:
Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944), U.S. author. All in the Day’s Work, ch. 19 (1939).
On the American pressure for cultural assimilation of different nationalities.
