Quotes from Maria Ressa

Embrace your fear. Imagine what you're most afraid of, touch it and hold it so that you rob it of its power.

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.

If I lose these tax-evasion cases and others filed by the Philippine government, I could go to jail for 10 to 15 years.

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

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

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 would give back every single award to be able to actually do our jobs as journalists without this kind of harassment.

So a lie told a million times becomes the truth.

Press freedom is the foundation of the rights of all Filipinos to the truth.

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.

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.

In a war zone you know exactly where the threats are coming from. I plan my way in and we plan our way out and you're there for a limited period of time.

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.

I landed in New Jersey, where I could barely speak English, and I had to figure out what a short brown kid was going to do in this big white world.

If you want to rip the heart out of a democracy, you go after the facts. That's what modern authoritarians do. You lie. All the time. Then, you say it's your opponents and the journalists who lie.

Now technology gives you a chance to help organize. You don't have to wait for either the inefficiency or the corruption. You don't have to wait for government. You can actually self-organize and build institutions bottom up.

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.

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

Journalism has a check-and-balance effect to those in power, and those in power submitted themselves to it.

Technology enabled Rappler's fast growth starting in 2012, but we were also among the first victims when social media was weaponized in 2016.

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.

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.