Ai Weiwei Quotes

213 Sourced Quotes

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.

Ai Weiwei
Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don't have to obey their own laws.

Ai Weiwei
Nothing can silence me as long as I am alive. I don't give any kind of excuse. If I cannot come out [of China] or I cannot go in [to China] this is not going to change my belief. But when I am there, I am in this condition: I see it, I see people who need help. Then you know, I just want to offer my possibility to help them.

Ai Weiwei
Before blogging, I was living in the Middle Ages. Now my feelings for time and space are entirely different.

Ai Weiwei
You see a Party system that crushes down anybody who [has] different opinions, who has different ideas in their mind. Simply to have different opinions can cost someone their life. They can be put in jail, they can be silenced, and they can [disappear]. And the other people would take it, not giving support.

Ai Weiwei
I don't really care that much about if I want to be more successful or less successful in art, because I never think life and art should be separate. What's life if you don't have conversation and joy and anger?

Ai Weiwei
The only reason they put me in jail is my involvement in politics, my criticism of the authorities. Later the excuse for my detention became my tax problem. But internally they never told me anything about it. I don't want to underestimate their intelligence, but up to this day I think what they did is very stupid. In fact, they even helped me in an ironic sense. They gave me a chance to explain what is happening with this system. They provided such a platform for me.

Ai Weiwei
If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

Ai Weiwei
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.

Ai Weiwei
Tax crimes should be investigated by the tax bureau, not through secret police detention.

Ai Weiwei
The 81 days of detention were a nightmare. I am not unique; it happened to many people in China. Conditions were extreme, created by a system that thinks it is above the law and has become a kind of monstrous machine. There were so many moments when I felt desperate and hopeless. But still, the next morning, I heard the birds singing.

Ai Weiwei
Maybe there is something I got from it. Maybe you also start to be clear on certain things.

Ai Weiwei
There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change.

Ai Weiwei
If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it's a human need.

Ai Weiwei
Expressing oneself is like a drug. I'm so addicted to it.

Ai Weiwei
Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don't feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.

Ai Weiwei
A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it's incomplete.

Ai Weiwei
My activism is a part of me. If my art has anything to do with me, then my activism is part of my art.

Ai Weiwei
Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

Ai Weiwei
I don't want the next generation to fight the same fight as I did.

Ai Weiwei
The Internet changes the structure of society all the time—this massiveness made of individuals.

Ai Weiwei
They have to have an enemy. They have to create you as their enemy in order for them to continue their existence. It's very ironic.

Ai Weiwei
A fine line separates Chinese intellectuals and professors from the political gangsters who protect them.

Ai Weiwei
It's never about me. [My supporters] use me as a mark for themselves to recognize their own form of life: I become their medium. I am always very clear about that.

Ai Weiwei
Twitter is the people's tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.

Ai Weiwei
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.

Ai Weiwei
It is better to have a retarded president who respects human values than a clever government without human values.

Ai Weiwei
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.

Ai Weiwei
I try to encourage people to look at our past in a critical way because as our education, we have a great, great history. But in reality we are poorest in ethics and philosophy, so I try to raise people's consciousness on how we deal with our past.

Ai Weiwei
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.

Ai Weiwei