They lack any ability to sense what is beautiful or what is proper. They can be learned and skillful, but they lack the ability to make their own free judgment. It is really sad to see young adults of 20, 25 years who were never taught to make their own decisions.
AI WEIWEIOf course, there [in China] has to be chaos. It has to be crazy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it except this government, which is really incapable of doing anything meaningful.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that. There are crises and emergencies all the time, we might not even be aware of some. But I am afraid we’ll have to wait and observe precisely what the government is up to.
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It’s the place they take you before they give you over to the judicial system. You stay there for a year or two and they make you really suffer to confess everything.
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Maybe [success] is because I’m in China and I’m more open. Maybe it’s my independent behavior, or because I participated in certain projects. I have no idea.
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Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.
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So for too long Americans take liberty as granted. We think we are in the safe hand, the democracy and the liberty, which is not true. And it can be even getting much worse than today.
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Through my work and ways of expression, I strive to engage in dialogue with the society that I am living in.
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I don’t think my father had a direct influence on me, but I do think, more or less, I was influenced by his independent individualism.
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The motivation is really to say people can find the game of getting involved interesting and find the problem and really have the passion and the enthusiasm to solve it and move forward, but that’s all I know.
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Man has a tendency to try to give clear reasons to be rational, but often you can see how all those reasons are not convincing and turn out to be a big nonsense.
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In the end, I think, the state’s rigidity is a function of its own insecurity, its indecisiveness.
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For those actors and directors who produce films which are always about the old kingdom or about heroes.
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If civil society has nobody who protects the law, then what kind of society is that?
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Any individual can contribute its own belief. And our society or even our government are made by the people. The people would have the final voice, but it requires each individual to act. If we don’t act, then the result is very clear.
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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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I don’t care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me. It deals with the city.
AI WEIWEI