Some People Need Killing Quotes

“This is a book about the dead, and the people who are left behind. It is also a personal story, written in my own voice, as a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own. The thousands who died were killed with the permission of my people. I am writing this book because I refuse to offer mine.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“The truth was simpler: It takes longer to type a sentence than it does to kill a man.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Slaughter dressed up in bureaucratese dulls the senses, and over time can anesthetize an entire population to the horror happening right where they live. Objective reality is winnowed away by each succeeding government report. The dead perish again, into nonexistence.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Maybe those who voted for death thought they had voted for a metaphor.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“President Duterte said kill the addicts, and the addicts died. He said kill the mayors, and the mayors died. He said kill the lawyers, and the lawyers died. Sometimes the dead weren’t drug dealers or corrupt mayors or human rights lawyers. Sometimes they were children, but they were killed anyway, and the president said they were collateral damage.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“I was born in the year democracy returned to the Philippines. I am here to report its death.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“In the aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, Thai protesters filled the streets of Bangkok. Another man stood before another tank at Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall fell, with Germany thanking the Philippines for showing them the way. Once upon a time, we were heroes.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Then one day the man who would be president promised the deaths of his own citizens. The terrible became ordinary, to thundering applause.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“Here is Jason Quizon’s confession, his act of contrition. He was conned and allowed himself to be conned. He is disappointed, not in Duterte, but in himself. Jason regrets his vote. He regrets the fact that maybe ten more people voted for Duterte because he told them to vote for Duterte.
For Jason, Rodrigo Duterte is a liar and “the most cowardly person to ever hold that position.”
When Jason Quizon voted again, he did not vote for the Duterte daughter, or the Marcos son. He is still disappointed, not only in himself, but in his people too. When it comes to elections, he says, Filipinos are still fucking morons.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“George Orwell’s contribution to understanding autocrats everywhere is necessary here. The word is doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously while accepting both. It was, Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the power “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them.” It was to use facts only when convenient, to disavow their existence when contradictory, and “to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” How dare the cops murder? How dare they not kill? Thus, the Orwellian lie, stripped of its subtleties.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“The final installment was published on May 2, seven days before the elections. It ended with a warning: “If Rodrigo Duterte wins,” we wrote, “his dictatorship will not be thrust upon us. It will be one we will have chosen for ourselves. Every progressive step society has made has been diminished by his presence. Duterte’s contempt for human rights, due process, and equal protection is legitimized by the applause at the end of every speech. We write this as a warning. The streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte keeps his promise. Take him at his word—and know you could be next.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Journalists are taught they are never the story. As it happened, the longer I was a journalist, the better it suited me to disappear behind the professional voice of an omniscient third person, belonging everywhere and nowhere, asking questions and answering none. Every conclusion I published was double-sourced, fact-checked, and hyperlinked. My name might have been below the headlines, but the stories I wrote belonged to other people in other places, families whose grief and pain were so massive that mine was irrelevant.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Nanlaban, under Rodrigo Duterte, did not mean only that a man had fought back. It meant he had fought and died. Nanlaban is judgment and justification, verb and noun, a shorthand for the dead bastards who deserved what they got.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“In the end, the presumption of regularity depended on what the mind infers. To kill legally, as the president has ordered, to fulfill a duty, as the president has defined; to continue to work, to do the job, to destroy the enemy - to do all this, the country must make the irrevocable connection between an addict and a gun. It is a connection that the president has made in speech after speech. That is what is normal, acceptable, regular.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“When the intention is to lie, numbers can make extraordinary liars.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“That I am Filipino means I understand guilt, in the complicated way only a Catholic raised in the colonized Philippines knows guilt. I know why a father kneels to wash away his son's blood while muttering apologies into the linoleum. I know he believes himself responsible for failing to stop the four bullets that burst through his thirty-year-old son's body: forehead, chest, and narrow shoulders, in a manner he sees as the sign of the cross—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“He called us fake news. He said we were paid hacks. We were charged with tax evasion and cyberlibel and ownership violations. Rappler’s license to operate was revoked. It remains under appeal. Our reporters were banned from covering the president.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“Rodrigo Duterte was not the first politician in the world to declare war on a domestic issue. Wars on poverty, pornography, hunger, obesity, cancer, and drugs have been launched and fought by presidents and potentates long before Duterte moved into Malacañang Palace. None of these wars have so far been won. None of that matters, because for the politician, the declaration is a victory”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“I did not want to be a writer. I wanted to be written about. The single overriding goal of my childhood was to become a heroine.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“Many of us, the children of middle-class Manila, were fed on Catholic guilt and raised under the bright sun of the American dream. We went to church. We went to school. We recited the rosary every night and ate no meat on Good Friday. We hung tinsel on plastic Christmas trees, studied John Steinbeck, memorized the beatitudes, and measured our skirts a polite three inches below the knees. Money was tight, but there were books. When my mother’s girlhood collection ran out, she sent me to my grandfather and his numbered bookshelves. I lived for most of my adolescence on rafts floating down the Mississippi, inside little houses on prairies, and around wood fires in the New England and Chicago and London of my imagination. I was Meg Murry. I was Jo March. I was Scout and Mowgli and Anne Shirley and Lyra Silvertongue and for one glorious summer Sherlock Holmes, with my father playing my indulgent Watson. My”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“Here is another grammatical point of interest: only transitive verbs have voice. Intransitive verbs cannot shift from active to passive, or from passive to active. No literary sleight of hand can hold someone else accountable for having sneezed your nose or arrived you late. Nor can anyone else do your dying, because die is an intransitive verb. You died. He died. She died. They died. Regardless of whether any of them were salvaged, it was the subject who did the dying, not the man with the gun.
Death, in the end, disappears all voices.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Jason saw Filipinos as gullible folk, always willing to leap onto the next bandwagon, always looking for the next racket, quick to outrage, quicker to forgive, susceptible to tall tales and taller accusations, devoid of social conscience until they felt threatened, and so perversely loyal that they made decisions at the cost of their own interests. Idiots all, he said, largely simple-minded.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“It was easy, one village captain told me, to identify a drug addict. It was "the aura" that gave it away. "I can tell from the eyes.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Fuck the bleeding hearts. To hell with bureaucracy. There would be no forgiveness, there would be no second chances, the line would be drawn, and on one side he would stand with a loaded gun.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“There were corpses every night at the height of the killings. Seven, twelve, twenty-six, the brutality reduced to a paragraph, sometimes only a sentence each. The language failed as the body count rose.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“man”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“Maybe those who had voted for death thought they had voted for a metaphor.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“When it comes to elections, Filipinos are still fucking morons.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“In the early years of the war, I fell in love, I learned to ride a bike, and I discovered firsthand just how much blood could fit on the inside of a grown man. The world kept turning, and people kept dying, and for the next few years I sat under the leafy green and wrote about the dead.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing