Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by Miriam Defensor-Santiago

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Filipino politician Miriam Defensor-Santiago.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
Miriam Defensor-Santiago

Miriam Palma Defensor-Santiago was a Filipino scholar, academic, lawyer, judge, author, and politician who served in all three branches of the Philippine government: judicial, executive, and legislative. Defensor Santiago was named one of The 100 Most Powerful Women in the World in 1997 by The Australian. She was known for being a long-serving Senator of the Republic of the Philippines, an elected judge of the International Criminal Court, and the sole woman recipient of the Philippines' highest national honor, the Quezon Service Cross.

What makes me angry is when people know what is right but have, over the years, attuned themselves to the fact that what they're doing, stealing money from government, is acceptable.
In effect, the Internet is a global connection of interconnected computers. It has been described as truly a peer-to-peer system with many distributed nodes and no central point of control architecture.
I thought you would have to be insane to go into politics. — © Miriam Defensor-Santiago
I thought you would have to be insane to go into politics.
I eat death threats for breakfast!
I'm not in the habit of going to a psychologist. I psychologize myself.
I refuse for any person or organized group to dictate to me what God is. That is really the height of insufferable hubris. I believe in just immediately putting to death or just putting over the cliff people who assume they know about God.
Experience has shown us that attempts to control the Internet will invariably fail. We should be instructed by the failed efforts of China to regulate political content, the efforts of America to regulate Internet gambling, or the efforts of Australia to regulate certain speech. By its very nature, the Internet will always resist such controls.
The Dalai Lama has taught me that the best way to live life is to try and avoid desire. Desire is really the basic source of unhappiness.
I have licked cancer, and I'm actually thinking of several career options.
I am a bankable candidate.
Research shows that when women are empowered as political leaders, countries often experience higher standards of living with positive developments in education, infrastructure, and health care.
As a factual matter, as in countries all over the world, technology and business practices have been running faster than legal responses and developments.
There is nothing wrong with centralizing the budget in Manila. We are such a small country.
The cancer that demands our urgent attention is corruption and poverty. — © Miriam Defensor-Santiago
The cancer that demands our urgent attention is corruption and poverty.
I do not have any strong desire to remain in government. When my task is done, I shall be happy to leave and enhance my love life with my husband.
There is simply too much corruption, too much money available for the taking.
No one has ever seen God. So, for me, it is acceptable that if you don't understand a thing, just call it God.
I don't think so-called high technology matters in death. I think they had high technology before Noah's Ark. And it got lost because that was the first Ice Age.
I articulate the deepest need of the Filipino people, which is reform of a corrupt culture.
Everything in politics is politically motivated, didn't you know?
Energy is always a matter of psychology for every individual.
My style is confrontational: when I see evil, I want to remove it right away.
Originally in the United States, there were no laws regulating behavioral advertising. As a result, like in the Philippines, government has relied on industry self-regulation.
I have passed all the physical hardships known to man.
It is illegal for the budget department to discriminate among senators.
Entering politics is a fate worse than death.
We are legislators, not public works contractors. People look up to us to make serious laws that could change the lives of a great number of people or could change the way society is run or managed.
Numerically, half of our high-ranking government officials should be women, and half should be men. And yet the division between the sexes is highly disproportionate in favour of men.
There are five requirements for an accused to turn state witness. One of the requirements is that the accused does not appear to be the most guilty.
Obviously, the Philippines or any regional state can never match Chinese defense spending, but we will have to develop minimum deterrence capabilities that allow us to resist and inflict sufficient retaliation if China continues to undermine Philippine territorial integrity.
Society leaders have urged me to seek the presidency. — © Miriam Defensor-Santiago
Society leaders have urged me to seek the presidency.
Planet Earth is estimated to have a lifetime of nine billion years. And we're right smack in the middle of our lifetime. We've been in the universe for 4.5 billion years. So, that should mean something. We should sort of take a look at where we came from and where we are going.
The Philippines must ensure that it adopts, as much as possible, an equi-balancing strategy towards both China and America. To push back against Chinese adventurism by deepening Philippine dependence on another power runs counter to the very logic of protecting its national sovereignty.
Although I may not be sweet, I am full of passion.
Since we all know that death is inevitable, I don't really see the difference between dying now and dying a decade later. So if I'm threatened with assassination, I welcome it!
Sisyphus, you know, had an easy life.
I have no one at my side except God and His angels. I pray to God that He will turn my enemies into pillars of salt.
The Philippines will have to once and for all abandon its full-spectrum dependence on America as a guarantor of its national security.
Sexy is the attraction that is given as an encomium to women or men, or the capacity to attract the attention of the opposite sex because of their physical attributes.
I want to be known as Terminator 2.
That's the very essence of pork barrelism, when you give a huge lump sum to a person and say, 'Well, tell us what you want it for, but you are free to decide where to spend it on.'
My father said, 'Aren't you going to do anything to help people? We have a whole rack of relatives who are always breaking the law. At least help your relatives.' And so that's what I did.
Barring public demand, any person who pursues the presidency out of personal ambition must be suffering from a basic genetic defect. — © Miriam Defensor-Santiago
Barring public demand, any person who pursues the presidency out of personal ambition must be suffering from a basic genetic defect.
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