Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
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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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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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Tax crimes should be investigated by the tax bureau, not through secret police detention.
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Nothing. Jail is about nothing. Completely blank.
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We should leave behind discrimination, because it is narrow-minded and ignorant, denies contact and warmth, and corrodes mankind’s belief that we can better ourselves. The only way to avoid misunderstanding, war, and bloodshed is to defend freedom of expression and to communicate with sincerity, concern, and good intentions.
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The world is a sphere, there is no East or West.
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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 don’t have this concept that separates my art from my daily life. They are one thing to me. They are always one. How do you find the way to express yourself and how to communicate with others?
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My activism is a part of me. If my art has anything to do with me, then my activism is part of my art.
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When the mayor of Nagoya denies the Nanjing Massacre, he gets blacklisted by the city of Nanjing. When the government of Sichuan denies 'tofu dregs' construction which caused the collapse of several schools, they get blacklisted by me.
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Block my blog if you want, but I cannot self-censor, because that is the only reason I have the blog. We both know this is a game. You have to play your part, and I have to play mine.
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This does not mean a meteor has fallen. This is the discovery of a star.
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I often ask myself if I am afraid of being detained again. I love freedom as much as anybody else, maybe more than most. But it is a tragedy to live your life in fear. It is worse than actually losing your freedom.
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I spend very little time just doing ''art as art.'
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The biggest crime of a dictatorship is to eradicate human feelings from people.
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You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.
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We need to get out of the old language.
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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.
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They just don’t trust people. They don’t trust individuals, they don’t trust any change that should serve and benefit people, and they try to stop it.
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A fine line separates Chinese intellectuals and professors from the political gangsters who protect them.
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Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.
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They all ask: Why? Why is it that this man’s name Ai Weiwei can never be typed on a Chinese computer or the whole sentence will disappear?
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Once again, the facts have been erased.
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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.