Renowned businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan may have been using speeches with plagiarized passages since 2007 without even realizing it, reports ABS-CBNNews.com. In fact, some allege that he may have been doing it years before.

Author Jessica Zafra, in her blog jessicarulestheuniverse.com, pointed out several similarities between Pangilinan's speeches and that of well-known figures such as Barack Obama, Theodore Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. Zafra likewise cited   Katrina Stuart Santiago's Facebook page for the info.

Other bloggers did their own sleuthing as well. In particular, the authors of thenashman.blogspot.com and saintbarry.wordpress.com cited examples of Pangilinan's speech writers' apparent plagiarism of other people's speeches.

One of the comparisons cited was the following:

Pangilinan's commencement address at Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan, March 2007 (see news article on the speech here):   "As for myself, I have always believed in the strenuous life, in the life of labor and effort. The highest form of success comes not to the man who desires easy peace or inherits instant wealth, but to the man who does not shrink from risks, from hardship, or from bitter toil."

Then, there's Roosevelt's speech at the Hamilton Club, April 1899 (see full speech here):   "I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that the highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph."

So much for originality.