Jose Rizal Quotes
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I don't see why I should bow my head when I could hold it high, or place it in the hands of my enemies when I can defeat them.
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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.
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There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves.
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It is enough for the evil people to succeed, for the good people to do nothing.
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Death has always been the first sign of European civilization when introduced in the Pacific.
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I honor the father in his son, not the son in his father. Each one receives a reward or punishment for his deeds, but not for the acts of others.
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The world laughs at another man's pain.
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Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows – it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.
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Why independence? If the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow.
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Genius has no country. It blossoms everywhere. Genius is like the light, the air. It is the heritage of all.
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To foretell the destiny of a nation, it is necessary to open a book that tells of her past.
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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!
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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.
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He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.
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One only dies once, and if one does not die well, a good opportunity is lost and will not present itself again.
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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.
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Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.
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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.
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To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence it would be to doubt everything.
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Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.
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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.
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Each one writes history according to his convenience.