Filipinos Quotes

“Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.”

“I dream of a morning when Filipinos can wake up from the centuries-long sleep that took them from their past and denied them their destiny as a people.”

“Filipinos don't wallow in what is miserable and ugly. They recycle the bad into things of beauty.”

“Integrity is a very important and an almost indispensable virtue that all leaders must possess. This is especially true in the Philippine context because we Filipinos really respond to leadership by example.”

“Filipinos are not worse than any other colonized people except that our colonization was a little longer, and the independence movement was always dictated in political terms, never in social ones. We borrowed terms, but we didn't understand them.”

“Since it is necessary to grant six million Filipinos their rights, so that they may be in fact Spaniards, let the government grant these rights freely and spontaneously, without damaging reservations, without irritating mistrust.”

“Countrymen: I have given proofs, as well as the best of you, of desiring liberty for our country, and I continue to desire it. But I place as a premise the education of the people, so that by means of instruction and work they may have a personality of their own and that they may make themselves worthy of that same liberty. In my writings I have recommended the study of the civic virtues, without which there can be no redemption. I have also written (and my words have been repeated) that reforms, to be fruitful, must come from above, that those which spring from below are uncertain and insecure movements. Imbued with these ideas, I cannot do less than condemn, and I do condemn, this absurd, savage rebellion, planned behind my back, which dishonors the Filipinos and discredits those who can speak for us. I abominate all criminal actions and refuse any kind of participation in them, pitying with all my heart the dupes who have allowed themselves to be deceived. Go back, then, to your homes, and may God forgive those who have acted in bad faith.”