Maria Ressa Quotes

The newspapers of your country seem to be more powerful than the government.

Whether it's Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.

I think if you open the door to government control of television, then you let in a host of questions about rights.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

The government would be able to go to court with respect to newspaper articles, broadcast pieces and the like that they thought were bad or harmful or even against the government and try to block them.

Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it's only and always about expanding government power and control over you.

At that point, which would be around February 2002, they came and they confiscated my computer, because, they said, they were suspecting that I was communicating with certain Senate members and taking this issue outside the Bureau.

I find it very offensive when the government tells me what I can and cannot watch. Censor yourself.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

It has been surprising to me that so few conservatives have voiced concern over the precedence that are being set in favor of suppression by this so-called conservative administration.

Give people control of the media and they will use it. Don’t give them control and you will lose it.

The ministry of interior may censor newspapers and ban them if they include anything that violates public security, threatens national unity, or contradicts Islam.

If you don't think a television news show represents the truth, you can turn off your TV. If you don't think a magazine represents the truth, you can cancel your subscription. You have the right to expose yourself to whatever information you want. But to have the government prescribing what the truth is or limiting the information available for the citizen is contrary to the 1st Amendment.

Television should be regulated like a toaster.

I see the FCC responding to an already repressive society and raw censorship is the result.

Mass protests often get books or films banned, but very few people take to the streets to challenge the right of the State to decide what we can read or watch - it's still someone else's problem.

I believe in it so passionately because anywhere you look in the world, where governments become too big or become authoritarian, speech and expression is one of the first fundamental freedoms to go.

The only thing worse than watching an Alex Jones video is the government trying to tell Google not to do it - to prevent people form watching the Alex Jones video. We can't even do it if we tried.

You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.

Newspapers are closed if they print the wrong things in Iran. Iranian journalists or Iranian-American journalists, for that matter, I think are pressured in a lot of different ways, expected to give information to intelligence services. Americans can be thrown out of the country.

Some people only speak of freedom of speech while they're out of power. Once they're in power, they're ruthless in suppressing the rights of others.

After visits to several Communist countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba), I feel strongly that most "revolutionary" types around the world don't realize the importance of freedom of the press and the air, a right to peaceably assemble and discuss anything, including the dangers of such discussions.

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

The traditional media [in China] is still heavily controlled by the government; social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit. But because you don't have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.

Now somebody will ask me, Pete, how can you prove these songs really make a difference? And I have to confess I can't prove a darn thing, except that the people in power must think they do something, because they keep the songs off the air.