Maria Kalaw Katigbak

"When my name was first mentioned for the beauty contest, the family was surprised that my father was all for my participation in it. His conservative views about women had naturally made us conclude that he would be against the attendant publicity. His only concern was to find out how strong the sentiment was for me."

"The reason why my father exerted himself to make me queen was to begin what—for lack of a better name—Ibshall call a tradition. My mother had been the first carnival queen in her day. I suppose it fascinated him to think of a daughter following her mother's footsteps, as indeed the newspapers then kept pointing out. It was a beautiful thought. It satisfied his hobby for collections."

"I am a positivist in the strict sense of the word. But I don't know if I really am in truth or in the sense that you ask. My father is an idealist, my mother a positivist. I think I share both."

"Politics is messy. A woman is for her home where she has a lot of work to do. Some women are gifted to be in business, well and good. But a woman should stay as far away as possible from politics."

"Scouting as a method in education was conceived to be exactly opposite to that of the classroom. No lectures or sermons, outdoors and not indoors, leadership in the pupil and not in the teacher, decision from the patrol group and not the individual, reliance on natural resources at hand and not on store-bough equipment, importance on trying and no on the result, the personality and not the dress, the spirit and not the body."

"Not that we do not want the government to extend relief when necessary, but it is the mark of a responsible and capable administration to make sure its efforts do not end there. Rehabilitation is a far better solution to our social difficulties because its effects will be lasting and permanent. It is urgent that relief be given promptly but it is more urgent to train the people, with the help of such relief, to be able to help themselves."

"The human spirit sleeps only while the body is weak and hungry. Because it is God-given, the spirit cannot always be deadened and filled. The dental of the intellectual as the true leader of the people in favor of the peasant and the laborer has not been proved by history."

"Who know but that, once his poverty and misery shall have been assuaged, the Chinese will return to the freedom of thought, speech, and enterprise that we have realized is necessary for personal happiness and national well-being."

"To condemn me because of an unrealistic law—which I am sure even the president has violated—is unfair. But to make this the issues of my candidacy and to overrule my clean record in the Senate is unjust."

"What Ninoy knows about the political game and how to be a professional in it could fill an encyclopedia. But look at him. You wouldn't even believe that he is already grown up. His impish stories, full of fun, hides a mind that, like a camera, sees and records and connects. A real political treasure, this Ninoy. Like his father before him."

"One of the challenges of being a senator is the solution to problems alien to one's field of interest or preparation. Like a knife, one is sharpened by these challenges, some of which are quite sharply new. In the Senate, one meets new types of people, new procedures of work, new competitions, both fair and unfair, new techniques of harassment from within and without the premises and the political party. More than these, one must learn the mastery of new subjects preparatory to defending them on the floor in sponsorship or questioning them during interpellation. Preparation has always been the key to success for these situations, and especially useful is the correct anticipation of an oppositionist to a measure, and who these oppositionists will be."

"A woman's life, like any one else's life, or, for that matter, like any enterprise or movement or activity or venture, improves with planning and programming. For woman, Nature herself made the plans and the program and duly prepared her physical body for it. Each plan and program has its own season in her life."

"Timing is the answer to many problems, the solution to many situations."

"Alignment and adjustment to God's plans for us is one of the basic requisites to happiness here in earth. This is especially necessary at a time when the Filipino woman, buoyed with a newfound sense of accomplishment, is tempted to forget what she was made for and how her talents can be used."

"Taking after her mother, Pura, who was the first Carnival Queen, she, too, was accorded the same honor 23 years later, even as she distinguished herself in the University of the Philippines where she majored in Philosophy and later pursued her master's degree in social work. A Barbour Scholarship awardee, she finished her master's degree in literature at the University of Michigan. She obtained her doctorate of philosophy in social science at the University of Santo Tomas with magna cum laude honors."