Ai Weiwei Quotes
- All Quotes
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I have to respect my life, and free expression is part of my life. I can never really silence myself.
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Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom.
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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?
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Tradition is only a readymade. It’s for us to make a new gesture-to use it as a reference, more as a starting point than conclusion. Of course, there are very different attitudes and interpretations about our past and our memory of it. And ours is never a complete one, but is broken. In China, but also in my practice.
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Tips on surviving the regime: Respect yourself and speak for others. Do one small thing every day to prove the existence of justice.
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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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Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.
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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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Tax crimes should be investigated by the tax bureau, not through secret police detention.
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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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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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Measuring national prestige by gold medals is like using Viagra to judge the potency of a man.
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What can they do besides exile me or make me disappear? They have no imagination or creativity.
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The Chinese government only superficially speaks the language of the international community.
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Once again, the facts have been erased.
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The 2008 Olympics has created an illusion of China to the public and to the outside world. It is so fantastic, so unreal, that the entire meaning of the games is being distorted.
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My voice is not for me. Every time I make a sentence I think how many people for how many generations had a voice that no one could hear. At most they will be remembered as numbers; in many cases, even numbers don’t exist.
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Nothing. Jail is about nothing. Completely blank.
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Anyone who cares about truth should avoid not politics, but Olympic lies.
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It doesn’t matter where I am-China will stay in me. I don’t know how far I can still walk on this road and what is the limit.
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I think all aesthetic judgments-all the aesthetic choices we are making-are moral choices. They cannot escape the moral dimension in the broader sense. It has to relate to the philosophical understanding of who we are and how so-called 'art and culture' functions in today’s world.
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My favorite word? It’s 'act.'
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The frustration mainly comes from trying to understand what they really want. Also, you cannot understand how can such a large nation maintain its so-called stability by doing something very unlawful. I mean, how can they possibly manage to stabilize the whole social condition by not acting with justice and fairness.
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The Internet changes the structure of society all the time-this massiveness made of individuals.