Nick Joaquín Quotes

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.

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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?

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.