Ambeth R. Ocampo Quotes

#1. 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

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

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#3. You are like a garbage man, what will you do with my life story?

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#4. I guess if you go around with famous people you are assured of some reflected (or deflected) glory.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#5. It is ironic that many Filipinos learn to love the Philippines while abroad, not at home.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#6. 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

#7. Filipinos have an aversion to blank walls.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#8. 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

#9. If there was anyone ma-porma during the Fil-American War, it was Heneral Goyo.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#10. Rizal's greatest misfortune is being national hero of the Philippines.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#11. 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

#12. These Filipinos will be your worst enemies if you commit the imprudence of attacking the Spaniards without the necessary preparation.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#13. 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

#14. Mahirap ngayon ang educational system. They're out for the degree, not knowledge.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#15. Make your children unhappy so they can face the world, but then, what is a world without children's laughter?

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#16. School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#17. Rizal learned the right ideas at the wrong time, and for this he was shot.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#18. Sometimes it pays not to be interested in what happened but in what did not happen.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#19. History is part of our birthright. We must claim it back and make it transform our lives

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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