Joyce’s Reviews > I Was the President's Mistress!! > Status Update

Self-help’s funny. If you can actually help yourself, why read a book by someone else?

making others willingly repeat lies is the height of power. Willingly repeating someone else’s lies is the height of powerlessness.

corruption thrives when temptation meets tolerance, and man, are we Pinoys a tolerant people.

I’ve thought long & hard about what freedom means and how easily commitment to it can become tyranny.

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We deserve the leaders we choose. Suffering the bad ones is part of our education in how to choose better ones. Or a step toward ourselves becoming the leaders we need.

bottoms of my pants so belled that each step almost clanged my arrival

For there are no tyrants where there are no slaves. When mainstream media is run by oligarchs & their partisans, we can no longer trust it. When they make it so we cannot know what’s true, we empower leaders who will tell us what to believe. For if he is deft enough to fool us, he is worthy enough for us to follow.

Every joke is a tiny revolution, wrote Orwell.

Not size of explosion, but how well it sticks. Mine were made w/gasoline, kerosene, tar, potassium chloride from my chemistry class, capped & sealed in empties of San Miguel Pale Pilsen… brown bottles concealed long rags snaking inside, & outside we taped windproof storm matches, as Finns did. … w/postage-stamp-sized sandpaper to light match that would burst bomb once the glass broke on its target

…armed with the university library, not the internet, our weapons steeped in history, science, and the truths of literature - not anonymity, Wikipedia, and cognitive bias.

My answer to your first question: Next, please.

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It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled. Attributed to Mark Twain, but his actual words were, "How easy it is to make people believe a lie and how hard it is to undo that work again."