Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Rizal

Language is doing double duty here: it is both a cultural heirloom and a political weapon. Rizal isn’t merely praising poetry or folklore; he’s outlining a survival strategy for a colonized people. In the Philippines under Spanish rule, power wasn’t only enforced through armies and taxes, but through schools, catechisms, and the subtle humiliation of being told your words were crude, provincial, unfit for governance. To preserve a language, in that context, is to refuse the colonizer’s deepest ambition: not just obedience, but internal consent.

The phrase "marks of liberty" is a shrewd choice. Liberty isn’t described as a constitution or a flag - things that empires can grant, revoke, or counterfeit. It’s a set of marks: traces, habits, memory cues. Language carries those marks in its everyday circuitry. It stores how a community names kinship, land, dignity, and grievance; it encodes what gets joked about, what gets shamed, what gets revered. Replace the language and you don’t just change vocabulary - you reroute the emotional and moral logic of a society.

Rizal’s intent is also diagnostic. He implies that the first signs of political captivity appear as linguistic erosion: when people stop teaching their children the mother tongue, when public life demands translation, when prestige attaches to the colonizer’s syllables. As a writer - and a nationalist executed by the state - Rizal is arguing that literacy, print, and vernacular pride aren’t side quests to liberation. They’re the infrastructure of it.