Quotes & Sayings About Philippine History

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

Throughout Philippine history, it's the immigrants who built fortunes and, in the process, helped build Philippine economy. — John Gokongwei

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

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

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

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

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

The cinema is, after all, the most timid of the arts. It never sets trends, it merely reflects them. The harm has been done long before the movies set cameras on the scene. Warring teen-age gangs antedated Rebel Without A Cause , at least in the United States; and the most infamous teen-age killer in Philippine history operated during the liberation times, long before James Dean was heard of. — Nick Joaquin