Ocampo Quotes & Sayings

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

On the surface, there is no distinction between our experiences - some are vivid, others opaque; some are pleasant, others cause agony upon recollection - but there is no way of knowing which are dreams and which are reality. — Silvina Ocampo

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'. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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

What matters is what we write: that is what we are, not some puppet made up by those who talk and enclose us in a prison so different from our dreams. — Silvina Ocampo

You are like a garbage man, what will you do with my life story? — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

Filipinos have an aversion to blank walls. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

Love is the demiurge that builds substance from the elements of our lives.

From "Big Enough for the Entire Universe — Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

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

Make your children unhappy so they can face the world, but then, what is a world without children's laughter? — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, wrote in 2006: International humanitarian law and the Rome statute permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur. A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) ... or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality). — Anonymous

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

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? — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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

Morality, like physical cleanliness, is not acquired once and for all: it can only be kept and renewed by a habit of constant watchfulness and discipline. — Victoria Ocampo

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

Sometimes it pays not to be interested in what happened but in what did not happen. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

Rizal's greatest misfortune is being national hero of the Philippines. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

Music is a language that requires no language. — Christian Ocampo

School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

When you write, everything is possible, even the very opposite of what you are. — Silvina Ocampo

With a combination of proper lighting and climate control he managed to achieve a different ecological niche in each gallery. In the African section, where the imbrications of Augustine, Mafouz and Okri lay decomposing, he grew sorghum and Dioscorea yams. In the Chinese gallery where the Tao Te Ching and countless Confucian annotations moldered, he grew rice, crab apples and barley. Over the poems of Neruda and Borges himself, he grew potatoes. Each plant in this new Eden he lovingly tainted with the virus of civilization

- from the short story "Resurrection — Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country? — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

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. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. — Jonna Amato-Ocampo