Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
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We have to give our opinion, we have to say something, or we are a part of it. As an artist I am forced to say something.
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Maybe there is something I got from it. Maybe you also start to be clear on certain things.
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To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.
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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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I think by shattering it we can create a new form, a new way to look at what is valuable-how we decide what is valuable.
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I spend very little time just doing ''art as art.'
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Very few people know why art sells so high. I don’t even know.
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Your own acts tell the world who you are and what kind of society you think it should be.
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Tax crimes should be investigated by the tax bureau, not through secret police detention.
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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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Stupidity can win for a moment, but it can never really succeed because the nature of humans is to seek freedom. Rulers can delay that freedom, but they cannot stop it.
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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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Because of the economic crisis, China and the United States are bound together. This is a totally new phenomenon, and nobody will fight for ideology anymore. It’s all about business.
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Before blogging, I was living in the Middle Ages. Now my feelings for time and space are entirely different.
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This is a decadent era. Its main characteristic is that it’s dependent on lies and cheating. Once it loses this characteristic, it can’t survive for even a day.
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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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Once you’ve tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country.
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The biggest crime of a dictatorship is to eradicate human feelings from people.
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House arrest, travel restrictions, surveillance, stopping phone service, cutting the Internet connection. What we can still do is greet the crazy motherland once again.
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The population is in a constant state of enforced dislocation. So let us hope that a totally new culture will come out of this.
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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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Nothing. Jail is about nothing. Completely blank.
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I’m not sure I’m good at art, but I find an escape in it.
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I came to art because I wanted to escape the other regulations of the society. The whole society is so political. But the irony is that my art becomes more and more political.