Philippines

"In his 2023 book The (Big) Year That Flew By, Arjan Dwarshuis highlights the critical plight of the Philippine Eagle, a species heavily threatened by persecution due to being wrongly blamed for livestock disappearing from local yards. Dwarshuis emphasizes the devastating impact of gunshots on this slow-reproducing species—they only raise one chick every two years—illustrated by a poignant moment where a guide reveals that a second eagle appearing is a mother calling for her mate, who was shot dead just months prior. This tragic anecdote underscores the shocking reality of human violence against these rare birds, prompting the author to question the madness behind destroying such awesome creatures."

"I said, to the people of the Philippines whence I came, I shall return. Tonight, I repeat those words: I shall return!"

"I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil."

"In the Philippines, America has evolved a model for this new free world of Asia. In the Philippines, America has demonstrated that peoples of the East and peoples of the West may walk side by side in mutual respect and with mutual benefit. The history of our sovereignty there has now the full confidence of the East."

"Of our former ward, the Philippines, we can look forward in confidence that the existing unrest will be corrected and a strong and healthy nation will grow in the longer aftermath of war's terrible destructiveness. We must be patient and understanding and never fail them -- as in our hour of need, they did not fail us. A Christian nation, the Philippines stand as a mighty bulwark of Christianity in the Far East, and its capacity for high moral leadership in Asia is unlimited."

"We want southern Philippines to be stable, peaceful, and we can then find opportunities here as much as we can help in contributing towards development through maybe foreign direct investment."

"This is absolutely not unique to Singapore. If there's one country that will definitely succeed with meritocracy, pragmatism and honesty, that's the Philippines. I say this because Filipinos are among the most talented people in the world today."

"Extreme poverty, the increasing availability of high-speed internet and the existence of a vast and comparatively wealthy overseas customer base has led to organised crime groups exploiting children for financial gain."

"Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos – out of all global citizens – spent the most time on the internet and on social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97% of our country’s citizens were on Facebook. When I told that statistic to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, he was quiet for a beat. “Wait, Maria,” he finally responded, looking directly at me, “where are the other three percent?” At the time, I laughed at his glib quip. I’m not laughing anymore. As these numbers show and as Facebook admits, the Philippines is ground zero for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace."

"There is currently no food, water or electricity. We can only imagine how much worse the situation will be for families living in towns and remote villages."

"We have been a colonized country. We have passed through all the trials and tribulations of a colonized people. It took us centuries and centuries to fight, to struggle, and to win our fight for the recognition of our independence."

"Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds."

"The only country in the early twentieth century where the United States could impose its model of development through colonization was the Philippines. Like Cuba, the Philippines had been taken over after the Spanish–American War, but unlike the island in the Caribbean, the Southeast Asian islands were kept under direct American control as a dependency. The possession of the Philippines gave the United States an opportunity to experiment with the transposition of American ideals to a culture regarded as alien. In spite of the initially fierce resistance by the Philippinos to the American colonial project, by the mid-1930s many Americans were convinced that enough progress had been made for the colony to gain its independence within a decade. An alliance in Washington between trade protectionists, New Deal reformers, and fiscal conservatives secured a timetable for decolonization, on the clear understanding that the United States would keep its military bases and most of its political influence intact. The Philippines was seen as a triumph for American reform: it had brought a ‘‘new day of freedom’’ to an Asian people who earlier could have entertained no hopes for such a future."