Ambeth Ocampo

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

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

“It is memory that has made the person I am today. Without memory we cannot form relationships, we cannot know who we are, we cannot forge our identities. The same is true for history.”

“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.”

“Rizal's greatest misfortune is being national hero of the Philippines.”

“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.”

“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.”

“As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct.”

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

“We teach history to instill in new generations the values of patriotism, citizenship, and love of country, but sometimes we must also remember that we teach history so that we can liberate ourselves from the past.”

“Is history repeating itself? Not really, we are the ones repeating history.”

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

“Sometimes it pays not to be interested in what happened but in what did not happen.”

“School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.”