Ai Weiwei Quotes
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A society that has no ideals, that discards the principles of humanitarianism, that abandons the fundamental rights and dignity of humanity, can only survive by denying truth, fairness and justice.
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It’s never about me. My supporters use me as a mark for themselves to recognize their own form of life: I become their medium. I am always very clear about that.
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I feel powerless all the time, but I regain my energy by making a very small difference that won’t cost me much.
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If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.
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They know too many things they should not know and they do not know some things they need to know.
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My work has always been political, because the choice of being an artist is political in China.
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Every day I think, this will be the day I get taken in again . . . .
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I often think what I’m saying is for the people who never had a chance to be heard.
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Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.
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Any power or structure that seeks to maintain full control and is not open in any way to loosening its power eventually makes itself ridiculous.
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I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.
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Tradition is only a readymade. It’s for us to make a new gesture-to use it as a reference, more as a starting point than conclusion. Of course, there are very different attitudes and interpretations about our past and our memory of it. And ours is never a complete one, but is broken. In China, but also in my practice.
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From my experience dealing with Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake I started to understand very clearly the character of local government. They will do anything. You will never really wrongly accuse them of anything because they do everything.
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Do they want me to stay? Do they want me to leave? Do they want me to hang myself? To kill myself? What do they want?
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I definitely know people who are shameless enough to give up basic values. I see this kind of art, and when I see it I feel ashamed. In China they treat art as some form of decoration, a self-indulgence. It is pretending to be art. It looks like art. It sells like art. But it is really a piece of shit.'
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As an artist, I am very familiar with how to show the details, how to transform them into a language people can understand. They the government know that the Internet is a strong force, unbearable for them.
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No matter how long our politicians order people to sing songs of praise, no matter how many fireworks they launch into the heavens, and no matter how many foreign leaders they embrace, they cannot arouse a genuine mood of joy and celebration among the people.
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A small act is worth a million thoughts.
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I don’t know about five years from now. I have no plans for that. Maybe I’ll be forgotten by then.
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My messages are temporary and shouldn’t be our permanent condition. And like the wind it will pass. We’ll have another wind coming.
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'Everything is art. Everything is politics.'
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I’m so fearful, that’s not fearless... I act more brave because I know the danger’s really there. If you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger.
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If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.
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There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change.