“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.”

“When a people holds onto its language, it holds onto a semblance of freedom, like a man who holds onto his independence when he retains his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of a people.”

“Man understood in the end what man is. He renounces the analysis of God, penetrating the impalpable, in which he has not seen, to give laws to the phantasms of his brain. Man understands that his inheritance is the greater world whose dominion is within his grasp. Tired of useless and presumptuous labor he bows his head and looks about him, and now he sees how our poets are born. Little by little nature's muses open their treasures and start to smile upon us, and lead us far from such labors.”

“He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.”

“Let us not ask for miracles, let us not ask for concern with what is good for the country of him who comes as a stranger to make his fortune and leave afterwards.”

“In the Philippines you are not considered to be honorable unless you have been to jail.”

“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.”