Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
-
This is something you can never erase. It leaves a scar on you.
-
I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression and to use any way to extend this power.
-
The Chinese authorities think of artists as prostitutes. And in reality it’s true: in the Communist system artists just represent what the power structure seeks them to represent. It is prostitution.'
-
In talking about memory and our history, I think our humanity, especially in China, is cut. Cut, broken, separated. If we have a character from our history and memory, the character is broken, it’s shattered.
-
It is better to have a retarded president who respects human values than a clever government without human values.
-
The Olympics are an event manipulated into misleading people into believing that we have entered a new, successful and harmonious period in our history. This is not true.
-
I also have to speak out for people around me who are afraid, who think it is not worth it or who have totally given up hope. So I want to set an example: you can do it and this is okay, to speak out.
-
I think China is in a chaos now and it could be more chaos. It’s an orderly chaos. It’s a party that ruthlessly violates every human’s basic rights to serve its own purpose.'
-
China is a society which forbids any flow of the information and freedom of speech. This is on record, so everybody should know this.
-
With 140 words in Chinese, you really can write a novel. Most of Confucius’s sentences are only four words, so 140 words might take his whole life to write. And you can discuss the most profound ideas related to democracy, freedom, poetry.
-
The most unfair things that could have happened in a society fell upon a blind man. This is something that no one can accept or explain away with any excuse. Everyone will ask: 'Do we actually have to exist in a society like this?'
-
I don’t want the next generation to fight the same fight as I did.
-
The Sichuan disaster is not the first nor the most wrongful. But all the details of this tragedy will be forgotten, and once again it will be like nothing ever happened. Eventually all these disasters will together create a bizarre miracle called civilization and evolution.
-
People often say I started to become too outspoken after a certain period. It’s all because of the Internet. If we didn’t have this technology I would be same as everybody else. I couldn’t really amplify my voice.
-
Later I became very involved in writing. I really enjoyed that moment of writing. People would pass around my sentences. That was a feeling I never had before. It was like a bullet out of the gun.
-
Consider why the quality of school dinners is declining, even as more and more golf courses are opened.
-
Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what’s on his mind. A fairy tale has come true.
-
At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you’re doing. They threaten people, your family, saying: 'Your children won’t find jobs.'
-
Neither fairness nor justice, neither reality nor humanity can be simulated or manipulated by wires or remote controls.
-
The disaster-makers always get away, while the innocent are always punished.
-
Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don’t have to obey their own laws.
-
In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want-not only you, your whole family and all people like you.
-
I wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical: I was born radical.
-
The world is not changing if you don’t shoulder the burden of responsibility.