Jose Rizal
Jose Rizal
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda or popularly known as José Rizalwas a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain. He was executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after an anti-colonial revolution, inspired in part by his writings, broke...
NationalityFilipino
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 June 1861
There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves.
He who would love much has also much to suffer.
No one has a monopoly of the true God, nor is there a nation or religion that can claim, or at any rate prove, that it has been given the exclusive right to the Creator or sole knowledge of His Being.
Dying people don't need medicine, the ones who remain do.
The appetite is sharpened by the first bites.
No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light!
If the Philippines secure their independence after heroic and stubborn conflicts, they can rest assured that neither England, nor Germany, nor France, and still less Holland, will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold.
My countrymen, I have given proofs that I am one most anxious for liberties for our country, and I am still desirous of them. But I place as a prior condition the education of the people, that by means of instruction and industry our country may have an individuality of its own and make itself worthy of these liberties.
History does not record in its annals any lasting domination exercised by one people over another, of different race, of diverse usages and customs, of opposite and divergent ideals. One of the two had to yield and succumb.
As God has not made anything useless in this world, as all beings fulfill obligations or a role in the sublime drama of Creation, I cannot exempt from this duty, and small though it be, I too have a mission to fill, as for example: alleviating the sufferings of my fellowmen.
Justice is the foremost virtue of the civilizing races. It subdues the barbarous nations, while injustice arouses the weakest.
We young Filipinos are trying to make over a nation and must not halt in our march, but from time to time turn our gaze upon our elders. We shall wish to read in their countenances approval of our actions.
The Philippine races, like all the Malays, do not succumb before the foreigner, like the Australians, the Polynesians and the Indians of the New World.
The Filipino embraces civilization and lives and thrives in every clime, in contact with every people.