Time & Perspective Quote by Corazon Aquino

Aquino refuses the comforting version of faith that asks people to sit still and call it virtue. In a country battered by dictatorship, assassination, and street-level terror, “patience” could easily become a political sedative: endure quietly, wait for the powerful to tire themselves out. Her first move is to strip that idea of its moral prestige. Passive suffering isn’t faith; it’s stagnation dressed up as holiness.

The pivot to “spirit” is the real engine here. She’s offering faith as an active interior discipline, something that “bears things” rather than merely tolerating them. The verb matters: bearing is weight-bearing, labor, stamina. It implies strain and choice, not a trance of acceptance. That’s where the subtext becomes political without naming politics. In the People Power era and its aftershocks, Aquino had to legitimize a democratic movement that was publicly nonviolent yet privately furious. She needed language that could hold grief and anger without tipping into vengeance.

The phrase “with resignations, yes” is a sly concession to Catholic realism: you don’t control the storm. But she immediately refuses resignation as the final note. “Blazing, serene hope” is a deliberately paradoxical pairing, fusing heat with composure. It’s an emotional posture designed for mass endurance: passionate enough to keep people moving, calm enough to keep them from burning the house down. In Aquino’s mouth, faith becomes not escape from history but a way of staying morally upright inside it.