The freedom of speech is an important yardstick for a society’s level of civilization.
AI WEIWEIThe media is the message. It carries the full intention and the meaning. Once you change it…it’s very disturbing.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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[Cultural departments] don’t care about culture. Maybe they’re the furthest from the people who understand culture.
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For artists and intellectuals today, what is most needed is to be clear about social responsibility, because that is what most people automatically give up. Just to protect yourself as an individual is very political.
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I don’t personally feel any association with a kind of culture related to state, or culture related to power, which I think is always disgusting.
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I don’t belong to a working system. They only select people if you belong to one so you can be controlled.
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Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I’m not nostalgic about the old city. I don’t enjoy it that much.
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The Internet changes the structure of society all the time — this massiveness made of individuals.
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Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious.
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The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.
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Censorship is saying: “I’m the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.” But the internet is like a tree that is growing.
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How to become a really modern society when today we are so – as a human being, we feel so powerful. We have high technology and a superb way of controlling our life. And at the same time, in many ways we are so primitive.
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What counts in the end is what the government does.
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There’s no single artwork I even want to mention or that I can even really think about it to have any feeling, to be proud of it.
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You don’t have to march on Tiananmen, but you do have to be clear-minded, to find your own means of expression.
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It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.
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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 WEIWEI