“I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.”

A few thousand are to be built in the next few years, all using taxpayer money. But there is no system, no research, no content, no good programs, no good managers.

I don’t think China should care if this crazy old guy should have a show here or not.

I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom

People have a tendency to become elite rather than to care about the general conditions of the society, which makes me sick. It’s an unbearable condition.

The media is the message. It carries the full intention and the meaning. Once you change it…it’s very disturbing.

We move so fast that memory is something we can only grasp

The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.

I have always stated I designed the stadium as a toilet seat.

Everyone thinks the Chinese government selected me. Never ever. I was selected by Herzog and de Meuron.

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.

I think of art as coming from daily life, daily experience. I think it’s very important not to have it become work for some kind of elite circle.

We never really see the global situation as a total situation. Today’s political leaders are still lacking of the vision.

If we all say the same thing, then I think the government has to listen. But because no one is saying it, I become singled out, even though what I’m saying is common sense.

People who can’t do that don’t get a sense of responsibility. And if you lack a sense of responsibility, you push the blame onto the system.

They very often just try to cope with their own election, their own popularity, solving the problem or selling the ideas to meet their own voters. By doing that, it creates a great imbalance in terms of making deals or treaty or all those things.

If civil society has nobody who protects the law, then what kind of society is that?

Our message will be that we’re going to make federal government buildings a model – an energy-efficient model – and also start matching grants for cities and counties so that they can also do the same with their government buildings.

Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls – their riches – in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.

Sydney’s a beautiful city. It was a great experience.

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here.

But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

Our children need to be able to see us take a stand for a value and against injustices, be those values and injustices in the family room, the boardroom, the classroom, or on the city streets.