Ferdinand Marcos's Quotes

People say I'm extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?

I always say you can never be extravagant with beauty. Beauty is God made real. Beauty is life.

I hate ugliness. You know I'm allergic to ugliness.

Never dress down for the poor. They won't respect you for it. They want their First Lady to look like a million dollars.

Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.

I really had no great love for shoes. I was a working First Lady; I was always in canvas shoes. I did nurture the shoes industry of the Philippines, and so every time there was a shoe fair, I would receive a pair of shoes as a token of gratitude.

Doesn't the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes.

I hardly can sleep. I feel that my target now is really to save Mother Earth for humanity. And it's doable.

If you know how much you've got, you probably haven't got much.

Filipinos don't wallow in what is miserable and ugly. They recycle the bad into things of beauty.

I love everybody. One of the great things about me is that I have a very positive attitude.

Continuous persecution of widows and orphans is a crime. Even the Bible says there is a specific place in hell for those who oppress widows.

I am First Lady by accident. I was not elected by the people but here I am.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it's so petty.

The problems with First Ladies is that you have to set the standard. My role is to be both star and slave.

If you know how rich you are, you are not rich. But me, I am not aware of the extent of my wealth. That's how rich we are.

We practically own everything in the Philippines.

God is love. I have loved. Therefore, I will go to heaven.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

I'm interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or 'explains,' the larger mysteries of religion.

In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we're off track.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

I'm basically a dinosaur. I don't use e-mail. But I do recognize the importance of science and the resulting possibilities.

I'm very politically active, but that has nothing to do with my charity.

Kids are wandering around the streets today that will become tomorrow's criminals that were yesterday's heroes.

Nanotechnology in medicine is going to have a major impact on the survival of the human race.

People used to believe only a professional could do tiling or install track lighting. That's utter nonsense.

When I understood the rudiments of what nanotech was all about, I knew I wanted to participate.

One of the things which make any company successful, in particular the Home Depot, was that we understood and catered to the customer. If it didn't sell, it didn't make a difference what we thought or our research told us. They told us if it was successful by buying it or not.

We could be the biggest pantyhose seller in America, but we don't want to weaken the link in shoppers' minds between Home Depot and do-it-yourself projects.

Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.

I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up.

It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.

Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term 'still' seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut.

I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.

I'm a fan of Oliver Stone. I like his movies, I like his excess, and I think he has a great capacity for empathy and it comes out more powerfully in this movie than in any of his other films, even the formal 'I'm identifying with the underdog' movies like 'Born on the Fourth of July.'

If 'Mystery Train' is my Nixon book and 'Lipstick Traces' my Reagan book, 'Invisible Republic' is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he'd done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end.

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.

Records that were the sound of somebody - more often than not, a she - speaking with a voice that had never been heard before. Somebody who'd never had the nerve to speak up before. I felt: 'I wanna meet these people.' Which is unusual for me: I don't usually want to meet the people who are making music that I like. But they sounded interesting.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.