Ambeth Ocampo Quotes

School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.

It is ironic that many Filipinos learn to love the Philippines while abroad, not at home.

As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct.

Sometimes it pays not to be interested in what happened but in what did not happen.

Rizal learned the right ideas at the wrong time, and for this he was shot.

A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.

Filipinos are not a reading people, and despite the compulsory course on the life and works of Rizal today, from the elementary to the university levels, it is accepted that the 'Noli me Tangere' and 'El Filibusterismo' are highly regarded but seldom read (if not totally ignored). Therefore one asks, how can unread novels exert any influence?

Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.

We make Rizal in our own image and likeness. Our image of Rizal is usually formed or deformed in school through numerous biographies with flattering titles.

Rizal's greatest misfortune is being national hero of the Philippines.

Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country?

Mahirap ngayon ang educational system. They're out for the degree, not knowledge.

Rizal" is a compulsory course in school, but few teachers make Rizal's novels interesting. If students are taught to enjoy Rizal's works as literature instead of as a lodemine of 'patriotic' allusions I am sure they would not mind reading and rereading the 'Noli me Tangere'.

Reading gives us the furniture of our minds. Reading can spell the difference between independence and slavery; liberation and isolation. Without reading, our history would have turned out differently. Reading made and shaped our heroes. Reading liberates.

Even a quick reading of Rizal's trial will prove that those who take Constantino's works uncritically are likewise guilty of "Veneration Without Understanding." Since there is so much fiction and faction in history it is always essential to return to the sources.

Filipinos have an aversion to blank walls.

I was to discover that like the overcoat that snugly wraps Rizal in all his statues and photographs, Rizal is obscured by countless myths and preconceived ideas... Without his overcoat, Rizal was human, like you and me.

If we cannot agree on what was important yesterday, what more on events that happened a hundred or three hundred years ago? The point here is that history is open ended and we cannot be sure about the past. So why study history? Because it teaches us to see the connections between events. Knowing how and why a certain event happened is helpful because in many cases people separated by time and place can sometimes be in similar situations. They can be mentally contemporaneous without knowing it. History gives us hindsight.

I guess if you go around with famous people you are assured of some reflected (or deflected) glory.

It is memory that has made the person I am today. Without memory we cannot form relationships, we cannot know who we are, we cannot forge our identities. The same is true for history.

You are like a garbage man, what will you do with my life story? Para kang nangangalakal ng basura!

...make your children unhappy so they can face the world, but then, what is a world without children's laughter?

History is part of our birthright. We must claim it back and make it transform our lives

...as we all know from experience elections actually divide more than unite.

To live is to be among men and to be among men is to struggle. (From Jose Rizal's letter to his nephew Alfredo or Freding)

Doreen Fernandez' foreword to "Rizal Without the Overcoat": His essays remind us that history need not and should not be relegated to schoolbooks and classrooms, where it often becomes a set of names and dates to memorize and spew out on test papers. History is a living and lively account of what we were and are; it could and should be as real to each of us as stories about family or about recent and past events.. If all of that makes us understand humanity better, so does history make us understand ourselves, and our country infinitely better, in the context of our culture and our society.

We teach history to instill in new generations the values of patriotism, citizenship, and love of country, but sometimes we must also remember that we teach history so that we can liberate ourselves from the past.

Although Rizal's novels are so familiar that we even have nicknames for them, nobody takes the Noli or Fili to read on holiday except for students cramming for an exam. Studying Rizal should result in an appreciation of his life and works, but all this has turned into a boring chore.

Nevertheless, I cannot refrain from expressing to you a certain melancholy upon thinking that this new being in whose veins Filipino blood runs and who will be educated with so much care will afterwards be a lost member for a country that is in need of men. ...he is one French more and one Filipino less. ...if the Philippines loses a son, at least humanity may gain one." (From Jose Rizal's letter to Fernando Canon, commenting on children born to OFWs and who grow up abroad)

If there was anyone ma-porma during the Fil-American War, it was Heneral Goyo.

These Filipinos will be your worst enemies if you commit the imprudence of attacking the Spaniards without the necessary preparation.

On this battlefield man has no better weapon than his intelligence, no other force but his heart. (From Jose Rizal's letter to his nephew Alfredo or Freding)

One just has to be observant, because when we deal with the every day we usually see, but we fail to notice.

It is one thing to know the past, but knowing what to do with it is something else. Our aim should be to be liberated from our history.