Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath (1861–1896)
José Rizal (June 19 1861 – December 30 1896) or known as José Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was a Filipino nationalist, doctor, writer, and polymath whose works and martyred death made him a hero of the Philippine Revolution. His mother was Teodora Alonso and his father is Francisco Mercado. Rizal studied highschool at Ateneo De Manila University and then went to University of Santo Tomas in Manila. He did his post graduate work at the University of Madridin 1882. He was a prolific writer who produced many influential works in different genres. His most notable works were his two novels Noli Me Tangere, published in 1887 and El Filibusterismo, published in 1891, which exposed the injustices of Spanish rule and inspired nationalism. Since he was still young he grew up in a cultured home, with a sizeable library. He learned to read and write. It was his mother who introduced him into the world of books and literature until then he started his literary works and poems that is well known in the Philippines
He was killed by execution by the Spanish Colonial Government on December 30, 1896 at the age of 35 in Bagumbayan, Manila, for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine Revolution broke out, which was inspired by his writings.
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The Filipino loves his country no less than the Spaniard does his, and although he is quieter, more peaceful and with more difficulty stirred up, once aroused he does not hesitate and for him the struggle means death to the finish. He has both the meekness and ferocity of the carabao. Climate affects bipeds in the same way it does quadrupeds.
No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.
...Does your Excellency know the spirit of (my) country? If you did, you would not say that I am "a spirit twisted by a German education," for the spirit that animates me I already had since childhood, before I learned a word of German. My spirit is "twisted" because I have been reared among injustices and abuses which I saw everywhere, because since a child I have seen many suffer stupidly and because I also have suffered. My "twisted spirit" is the product of that constant vision of the moral ideal that succumbs before the powerful reality of abuses, arbitrariness, hypocrisies, farces, violence, perfidies and other base passions. And "twisted" like my spirit is that of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have not yet left their miserable homes, who speak no other language except their own, and who, if they could write or express their thoughts, would make my Noli me tangere very tiny indeed, and with their volumes there would be enough to build pyramids for the corpses of all the tyrants...