Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
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I have no sense of why I lost my freedom and if you do not know how you lost something, how can you protect it?'
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The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that.
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A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.
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Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don’t feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.
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But censorship by itself doesn’t work. It is, as Mao said, about the pen and the gun.
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China might seem quite successful in its controls, but it has only raised the water level. It’s like building a dam: it thinks there is more water so it will build higher. But every drop of water is still in there. It doesn’t understand how to let the pressure out. It builds up a way to maintain control and push the problem to the next generation.
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The Chinese government only superficially speaks the language of the international community.
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I think I have this responsibility to my father’s generation, and especially future generations.
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Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.
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The great success of this system is that it makes the general public afraid of taking responsibility, afraid of taking a position or giving a definite answer, or even of making mistakes.
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Chairman Mao was the first in the world to use Twitter. All his quotations are within 140 words.
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Life is never guaranteed to be safe, so we better use it while we are still in good condition.
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I don’t feel powerful at all. I am still under this kind of detention, and you know, this is kind of a bail. Even yesterday I realized while trying to take care of the baby, at the park, I had been secretly followed and it’s quite fragile. Maybe being powerful means to be fragile.
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I am very much interested in the so-called useless object. I mean, it takes perfect craftsmanship, beautiful material carefully measured and crafted, but at the same time it’s really useless.
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The government computer has one button: delete.
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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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I am always trying to find how to get the message through. In Munich we custom-made five thousand backpacks like the ones of those students who died in Sichuan to construct a simple sentence spoken by the mother of a dead student. It was: 'She has been happily living in this world for seven years.'
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It’s hard to recover. You become not so innocent. You become, in a way, more sophisticated, which I think you shouldn’t. We should all have more simple happiness . . . . You become bitter.
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We see plenty of artistic work that reflects superficial social conditions, but very little work that questions fundamental values.
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If there is one who’s not free, then I am not free. If there is one who suffers, then I suffer.
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I’ve never planned any part of my career-except being an artist. And I was pushed into that corner because I thought being an artist was the only way to have a little freedom.
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To protect the right of expression is the central part of an artist’s activity. . . . . In China many essential rights are lacking, and I wanted to remind people of this.
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Cover-ups and deception are the nature of this society. Without lies it won’t exist.
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Choices after waking up: To be true or to lie? To take action or be brainwashed? To be free or be jailed?