Nature & Animals Quote by Jose Rizal

Rizal doesn’t bother with polite persuasion here; he goes straight for the gut. Calling someone “worse than an animal and smelly fish” is deliberately excessive, almost cartoonish in its disgust, and that’s the point: shame is being used as a civic tool. This is not a genteel ode to poetry. It’s a warning flare aimed at colonized minds.

The intent is nationalist, but not narrowly sentimental. For Rizal, “language” isn’t just a medium of expression; it’s the operating system of a people: how memory is stored, how solidarity is organized, how dignity is narrated. Under Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines, prestige languages (Spanish, later English) weren’t neutral upgrades; they were gatekeeping mechanisms that trained elites to look outward for validation and inward with embarrassment. To “not love” one’s language is, in that context, to collaborate in your own erasure.

The subtext is class critique. Rizal is swiping at the ilustrado tendency to perform sophistication by abandoning local tongues, treating them as provincial noise. He frames that abandonment as a moral failure, not a lifestyle choice. The animal/fish imagery does double work: it’s visceral and it’s dehumanizing, mirroring how colonizers often described the colonized. Rizal flips the script, making self-contempt the real degradation.

It works because it refuses neutrality. By making linguistic loyalty a test of character, Rizal turns culture into consequence - a provocation meant to sting, rally, and discipline a nation still being invented.