Ai Weiwei Quotes
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On the Internet, people do not know each other, they don’t have common leaders, sometimes not even a common political goal. But they come together on certain issues. I think that is a miracle. It never happened in the past. Without the Internet, I would not even be Ai Weiwei today. I would just be an artist somewhere doing my shows.
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This is something you can never erase. It leaves a scar on you.
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They don’t believe in liberty. They don’t believe in China before the Communists. There is only one simple, clear task: to protect their control, to maintain their governing. Which is such a pity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.'
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I don’t want the next generation to fight the same fight as I did.
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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.
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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.
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People have said, if you leave, you may never come back. Or they may not even let you leave. So this is always a cost you may have to pay. But I don’t want to restrict myself: When it happens, it happens. I have to deal with it, but not to prepare for it, because it is a kind of stupidity. If you prepare for it too much, you become a part of it.
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I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression and to use any way to extend this power.
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It is better to have a retarded president who respects human values than a clever government without human values.
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It is absurd that so much money has been wasted on manipulating public opinion, on simulating emotion. This nation is notorious for its ability to make or fake anything cheaply. 'Made-in-China' goods now fill homes around the world. But our giant country has a small problem. We can’t manufacture the happiness of our people.
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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.
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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?'
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I cannot ever accept the kind of conditions where you can sacrifice someone’s rights.
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China is a society which forbids any flow of the information and freedom of speech. This is on record, so everybody should know this.
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Neither fairness nor justice, neither reality nor humanity can be simulated or manipulated by wires or remote controls.
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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.
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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.'
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I call on people to be 'obsessed citizens,' forever questioning and asking for accountability. That’s the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.
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The disaster-makers always get away, while the innocent are always punished.