Reportage on Crime Quotes

“The movies can only, if they do anything at all, aggravate the damage. We deceive ourselves if we think that, by striking at the movies, we strike at the root of the evil. We cannot so easily shift guilt to the movie producers or the movie stars or the movie censors.

More censorship may be a cure that's worse than the disease, for we would be surrendering freedom of judgement in exchange for peace of mind. Not only our children but we ourselves may eventually find ourselves deprived of the right to distinguish for ourselves the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“The cinema is, after all, the most timid of the arts. It never sets trends, it merely reflects them. The harm has been done long before the movies set cameras on the scene. Warring teen-age gangs antedated Rebel Without A Cause , at least in the United States; and the most infamous teen-age killer in Philippine history operated during the liberation times, long before James Dean was heard of.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“People who confuse social behavior with manners naturally think of it as something that can be donned and doffed, a fashion that can be copied. But social behavior is nerve and bone, not clothes, and is never just a copy, however derivative it may look.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“The hyperbole was accompanied by plain macaroni.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“The fatalism of the Filipino is usually passive, expressed in the classic proverb about our fortune coming to us though we seek it not. But the more complex form of that fatalism sees a man as being steered in a certain direction by one circumstance after another until he finally reaches a point when, though he acts voluntarily—or he thinks he acts voluntarily—he is actually being pushed by the circumstances that brought him to the point of action. The fatalist, as he looks back before he acts, sees everything as having conspired to make him perform that particular act, and therefore sees it as inevitable, as "fate". This is the amok mentality. Afterwards, what others regard as an act of will, the fatalist regards quite sincerely as a product of circumstances.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“An age that needs security guards is, of course, without security.

What do we have in the dull old days? Old man janitors in the schools; watchmen in the factories, and the watchman was usually the turbanned bearded Bombay armed only with a stick, drowsing on a stool by a gate. How his strong odor remembered now seems the very smell of safety!

In his place now lurks the man in uniform, armed with pistol and club and submachine gun: the "security" that stands for the insecurity of our times, being the human equivalent of the iron bars at the window, the barbed wire on the wall.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“The fire on Calle Castillejos blazed forth the city's (Manila) ills: the influx from the provinces, the rise of the rentals, the greed of the propertied, the deterioration of living standards, and the flight of the old Manileño.

By abandoning his old home,he doomed it to slum. By yielding his city to people with no roots in it, he suffered it to become what it is now: a city of squatters, a city of lodgers. Residential Quiapo is a dreadful example of what happened after the Manileño was crowded out of his city by the provincianos, the schools and the filling stations.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines