Nick Joaquín Quotes

If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life... The rift is... between folk culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.

~ Nick Joaquín

Tolerance means to have the heart open to all differences, it is the honorable attitude of receiving another's opinion in order to appreciate it, it is the generous willingness to reach an agreement for the common good. Tolerance is the most precious virtue of democracy.

~ Nick Joaquín

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

~ Nick Joaquín

This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

~ Nick Joaquín

If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.

~ Nick Joaquín

Environment is what you make it and destiny is how you react to your environment: whether you try to overcome it or just resign yourself to it.

~ Nick Joaquín

We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.

~ Nick Joaquín

When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?

~ Nick Joaquín

Shouldn't we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man, and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?

~ Nick Joaquín

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

~ Nick Joaquín

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino, after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

~ Nick Joaquín

No individual existence can be traced further than the moment of conception, which determined that what was to be born would be this person and no other. The person may change from baby to child, and from boy to man, but through all these changes he will remain this person and cannot be another, because all possibilities to the contrary that may have existed before the moment of conception ended forever with the moment of conception.

~ Nick Joaquín

...and that there were many things grow-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

~ Nick Joaquín

...and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

~ Nick Joaquín

The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.

~ Nick Joaquín

I love is a door girls slam in their fathers' faces.

~ Nick Joaquín

An age that needs security guards is, of course, without security. What do we have in the dull old days? Old man janitors in the schools; watchmen in the factories, and the watchman was usually the turbanned bearded Bombay armed only with a stick, drowsing on a stool by a gate. How his strong odor remembered now seems the very smell of safety!In his place now lurks the man in uniform, armed with pistol and club and submachine gun: the security that stands for the insecurity of our times, being the human equivalent of the iron bars at the window, the barbed wire on the wall.

~ Nick Joaquín