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
Justice is the foremost virtue of the civilizing races. It subdues the barbarous nations, while injustice arouses the weakest.
I believe in revelation, but not in revelation which each religion claims to possess... but in the living revelation which surrounds us on every side - mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die.
When there is in nature no fixed condition, how much less must there be in the life of a people, beings endowed with mobility and movement!
In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it.
To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer.
Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows – it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.
Death has always been the first sign of European civilization when introduced in the Pacific.
For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.
A God who chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it, and it is just, very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer them. It is the God of liberty ... who obliges us to love it, by making the yoke heavy for us - a God of mercy, of equity, who while He chastises us betters us and only grants prosperity to him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.
But because their ancestors were men of righteousness, shall we consent to the abuses of their degenerate descendants? Because they did us a great good, would we be guilty if we prevented them from doing us evil?
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.
The appetite is sharpened by the first bites.
Each one writes history according to his convenience.
Virtue lies in the middle ground.