Time & Perspective Quote by Jose Rizal

History isn’t a neutral ledger in Rizal’s world; it’s a weaponized draft, revised by whoever holds the pen and the power. “Each one writes history according to his convenience” lands like a quiet accusation, aimed at the colonial habit of turning conquest into “civilization” and resistance into “banditry”. Rizal, a writer working under Spanish rule in the Philippines, knew that empires don’t just occupy land. They occupy narrative. The line exposes that occupation with the crisp efficiency of a maxim: the past is constantly being edited to flatter the present.

Its bite comes from the word “convenience”, which sounds small, almost domestic, as if history were rearranged like furniture to make a room more comfortable. That understatement is the point. Rizal suggests that the grand myths of nations are often built on ordinary self-interest: careerism, pride, fear, the desire to appear righteous. The subtext isn’t only anti-colonial; it’s anti-complacency. If everyone is tempted to tailor the past, then the oppressed aren’t automatically pure either. The warning cuts both ways.

Rizal’s broader project was to contest Spain’s story about Filipinos as backward and unfit for self-rule. His novels and essays weren’t just literature; they were counter-archives, attempts to make memory and identity harder to manipulate. The line still stings because it anticipates our current ecosystem of curated timelines, strategic amnesia, and “patriotic” revisionism. It dares readers to ask: convenient for whom, and at what cost?