Maria Ressa Quotes

After I got arrested the Filipino government unshackled me. I knew first-hand how they violated my rights and I could speak about that from experience.

Don’t be afraid – if you don’t exercise your rights, you will lose them.

Always make the choice to learn. What Princeton taught me was whatever mess you are studying, pull a thread with great persistence ’til you have clarity of thought. Princeton taught me how to solve a problem. How to think – that’s what we pull out of this place.

The attacks against me and Rappler began appearing on Facebook in the summer of 2016. A year later President Rodrigo Duterte was repeating them in his State of the Nation address.

A Princeton education sets you up for life: you have learned how to learn, and at a time when technology has changed everything, you will constantly have to learn.

Investigative journalism is never mass-based; it’s very focused, and you want people who are passionate about it to take it.

I’m not a critic, I’m a journalist. I’m doing my job holding the government to account.

I’m not a politician; I’m a journalist.

I think that social media platforms and technology have been the accelerator for the push for the populist-style administrations in democratically elected presidents.

Then there is my country, the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte placed most of the country under a lockdown on the ides of March. Surrounded by men in uniform, he cut public transportation and talked about home quarantine, checkpoints and curfews, but said little about the virus or economic aid for those in need.

To deal with COVID-19, countries like India, Brazil, Jordan and Thailand are cutting press freedom and freedom of expression. In nations like Israel, South Korea and the U.S., intrusive surveillance has been imposed to track the movement of citizens, at the expense of human rights.

After living a decade in Jakarta, I chose. I chose Manila, the Philippines, for better or worse.

Let me go back to a fundamental thing we all used to agree on: information is power. That’s why we became journalists in the first place.

I work too hard, I’d be a really bad mom, unfortunately. I can’t even keep a plant!

When you’re on social media, your brain is being rewired.

The social media platforms have taken over the distribution of news globally. They treat a lie the same way you would treat a fact.

What are the values that give meaning? What is the line that you will never cross, because on this side you’re good, and on this side you’re evil.

In a weird way, I’m a good target for the government, because I can push back.

We know firsthand how social media and the law have been weaponized against perceived critics of the Duterte administration. We’ve been reporting on it from the start.

You cannot succeed if at some point you haven’t failed.

Press freedom is not just about journalists, right? It’s not just about us, it’s not just about me, it’s not just about Rappler. Press freedom is… the foundation of every single right of every single Filipino to the truth, so that we can hold the powerful to account.

The difference between Rappler and other newsgroups in the Philippines is that journalists control Rappler both editorially and commercially. We make decisions that are bad for business but protect the public sphere.

If the social media platforms don’t take the gatekeeping seriously they will kill the public sphere. If we don’t get this right in 2020 you can open a decade or longer of a descent into fascism. And it will be global because platforms are global.

Truth matters. Checks and balances matter.

All around the world, leaders are gaining more power. That’s what this pandemic demands: a coordinated whole-of-nation approach with a powerful conductor at its center.

I’m banking on the fact that there are still good people in government who will prevent this. I’ve been a journalist for more than 33 years, and at Rappler we refuse to change, I refuse to be bullied.

My heroes were always a combination of Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. You have to be ruled by logic, but if you’re only ruled by logic and you don’t touch your emotions, you will make the wrong instinctive call.

Without facts you can’t have truth.

The more you do the right thing, the harder it is to do the wrong thing.