Ai Weiwei Quotes

213 Sourced Quotes

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

Ai Weiwei
At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you're doing. They threaten people, your family, saying: 'Your children won't find jobs.'

Ai Weiwei
Do they want me to stay? Do they want me to leave? Do they want me to hang myself? To kill myself? What do they want?

Ai Weiwei
I think restrictions are an essential condition in the fight for freedom of expression. It's also a source for any kind of creativity.

Ai Weiwei
This simple form of repression, of using the method of not letting anyone speak, will never succeed.

Ai Weiwei
Freedom of speech implies the world isn't defined. It is meaningful when people are allowed to see the world their way.

Ai Weiwei
In talking about memory and our history, I think our humanity, especially in China, is cut. Cut, broken, separated. If we have a character from our history and memory, the character is broken, it's shattered.

Ai Weiwei
I always want to design a frame that's open to everyone. I don't see art as a secret code.

Ai Weiwei
The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China.

Ai Weiwei
Choices after waking up: To be true or to lie? To take action or be brainwashed? To be free or be jailed?

Ai Weiwei
Your own acts tell the world who you are and what kind of society you think it should be.

Ai Weiwei
Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught.

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
Three years after the CCTV headquarters fire [in Beijing in February 2009], human skeletons lie forgotten. Is anyone accountable?

Ai Weiwei
They [the government] really want to maintain power. At the same time, they refuse to communicate. They refuse to have good intentions. They refuse to be sincere. How can that last?

Ai Weiwei
From my experience dealing with Sichuan [after the 2008 earthquake] I started to understand very clearly the character of local government. They will do anything. You will never really wrongly accuse them of anything because they do everything.

Ai Weiwei
In China, there is a long history of the government not revealing information, so it's difficult for the Chinese people to ever know the truth. It is vital that we try to bring that truth to life.

Ai Weiwei
I wouldn't say I've become more radical: I was born radical.

Ai Weiwei
To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

Ai Weiwei
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.

Ai Weiwei
But censorship by itself doesn't work. It is, as Mao said, about the pen and the gun.

Ai Weiwei
To me, to be political means you associate your work with a larger number of people's living conditions, and that includes both mental and physical conditions. And you try to use your work to affect the situation.

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
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
The disaster-makers always get away, while the innocent are always punished.

Ai Weiwei