Hopefully, other successes aren’t like me. It carries much more meaning to other people; my success story is irrelevant. It doesn’t make any sense.
AI WEIWEILiberty is about our rights to question everything.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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That’s why the country can’t face up to open competition – unless it resorts to measures like North Korea.
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The Internet is the best thing that ever happened to China. It turns us into individuals and also enables us to share our perceptions and feelings. It creates a culture of individualism and exchange even though the real society doesn’t promote it.
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I wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical: I was born radical.
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Stupidity can win for a moment, but it can never really succeed because the nature of humans is to seek freedom. Rulers can delay that freedom, but they cannot stop it.
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Mass production is nothing new. Weren’t cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids?
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I want people to see their own power.
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Of course, most luxury goods in China are for corrupted officials and their relatives. And that made China become the biggest luxury-goods market.
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You have so many museums in the West, and so many shows, you need somebody to show the work, otherwise it’s empty.
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I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years.
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The deadly weapon against totalitarian society is openness – doing everything very openly on the Internet, letting people know every detail, any little development. Once it is out there, everybody can make their own judgement.
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What is important is that we actively express our thoughts and wishes, in every realm that we can access.
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I deal with students every day – from China, Germany, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And I’ve noticed that the Chinese students are the least trained in having a sense of aesthetics.
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The rest of the world understands little about China’s changes and the possibilities and crises that come with them.
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I have to find a place for my own. I have to search for my own happiness.
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This world should be much more open and should be much more free, so the young people would have the chance to exercise the quality of their lives.
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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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It’s just a way you have to set up some kind of activities to follow your instincts or your curiosities.
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I don’t think China should care if this crazy old guy should have a show here or not.
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I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me.
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I have people working together, doing different things: architecture, art installation, photography, publishing, and curatorial works and design.
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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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Of 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.
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We are not on – even just a step away from the most brutal and primitive crudity. To be very crude on those issues, which is always challenges and we always have to look at the situation like a mirror, to draw some understanding.
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Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught.
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No state or society can claim to have established human rights once and for all.
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The whole Chinese system – not just the political leadership, the military too, the whole power structure, our education system, the whole of society – is suffering from being cut off from the free flow of information.
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