Our appreciation of folk art will strengthen our identities, our pride in belonging to a community. People trained in the creative use of their hands soon acquire skills, excellent craftsmanship which will be the most important measure of how well we can industrialize.

I believe in humanity - not just you or Mother, but all mankind. Do I sound like a preacher or a cheap politician making a pretty speech? This is not what I intend to do... I believe in life, that it is sweet and that, for all its occasional bitterness, we-man, that is-are headed toward something better - fulfillment. There is much shame, however, and so much hypocrisy around us and these inhibit our fulfillment as human beings.

‎Sometimes we have to lie so that we do not needlessly hurt others. The important thing is that we are honest with ourselves. That we know how to bend without breaking ourselves. -Crepusculo Lepidoptera

Life is always sad. That's what makes suicide so tempting because life is all that we really have and haven't. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future-what escape is there from these? None-and yet sometimes we are life's happy victims.

The Japanese bureaucracy is unique. It is also very powerful, although it is now the object of so much criticism. Many of Japans brightest made it a pillar of strength and continuity.

A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson’s biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It’s first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing.

I write to please myself—of course, that is a given. But beyond this reach for pleasure, I know that I write for my countrymen, that they may be lifted from apathy and ignorance. I write because of a compulsion to make something out of the nothing that is my own life.