José Rizal: Trending quotes

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José Rizal: 128 quotes51 likes

“He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and a smelly fish.”

This has long been attributed to Rizal as part of a poem, titled Sa Aking Mga Kabata (To My Fellow Children), he wrote at the age of 8, as quoted in " Community Celebrates Rizal Day" in Asian Journal USA (31 December 2007) http://asianjournalusa.com/community-celebrates-rizal-day-p3868-95.htm, but this has become disputed as highly unlikely in "Did young Rizal really write poem for children?" by Ambeth R. Ocampo, in Philippine Daily Inquirer (22 August 22 2011) http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/45479/did-young-rizal-really-write-poem-for-children <br class="br">Disputed

“Fate presented itself to some like a chinese fan--one side black, the other side gilded with flowers.”

José Rizal

Noli me Tangere

“…Does your Excellency know the spirit of (my) country? If you did, you would not say that I am "a spirit twisted by a German education," for the spirit that animates me I already had since childhood, before I learned a word of German. My spirit is "twisted" because I have been reared among injustices and abuses which I saw everywhere, because since a child I have seen many suffer stupidly and because I also have suffered. My "twisted spirit" is the product of that constant vision of the moral ideal that succumbs before the powerful reality of abuses, arbitrariness, hypocrisies, farces, violence, perfidies and other base passions. And "twisted" like my spirit is that of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have not yet left their miserable homes, who speak no other language except their own, and who, if they could write or express their thoughts, would make my Noli me tangere very tiny indeed, and with their volumes there would be enough to build pyramids for the corpses of all the tyrants…”

José Rizal

Open letter to Barrantes on the Noli, published in La Solidaridad (15 February 1890)

“The Filipino loves his country no less than the Spaniard does his, and although he is quieter, more peaceful and with more difficulty stirred up, once aroused he does not hesitate and for him the struggle means death to the finish. He has both the meekness and ferocity of the carabao. Climate affects bipeds in the same way it does quadrupeds.”

José Rizal

"The Philippines: A Century Hence" in La Solidaridad (1889-90) - translated from the Spanish by Charles Derbyshire

“I go where there are no slaves, hangmen or oppressors;
Where faith does not kill; where the one who reigns is God.”

José Rizal

"Mi Ultimo Adios" st. 13 - poem written on the eve of his execution (29 December 1896) - translated from the Spanish by Charles Derbyshire.