I think Allen [Ginsberg] was a person who’s like a child.
AI WEIWEIIf there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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My typical day is I wake up and appreciate that I can still wake up.
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Paintings can be painted with the left hand, the right hand, someone else’s hand, or many people’s hands. The scale of production is irrelevant to its content.
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It’s like the mountains, the ocean and the rivers. It has its own geological forms. Societies cannot be flat. But during change, human rights, human dignity and free speech have to be protected. Otherwise, we’ll be going backward.
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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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Nationality started as something natural, but we should not be restrained by the old politics that make up these clear lines. It should have its own way of evolving. In some places, it will evolve slower and in others, faster.
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Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it.
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If a master, a wise and experienced man, wields a great weapon, that’s beautiful. He can serve peace with it. But if someone’s emotions are imbalanced, even if he has the best equipment,
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If there’s the right condition, I always want to express the concept or ideas in a very independent way.
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If there is no free speech, every single life has lived in vain
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But personally, I don’t think my work and my understanding of art is so much related to being Chinese, but the character of that. Maybe it’s beyond my own consciousness.
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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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Selling high or low doesn’t mean anything. It has to do purely with the market.
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I have to respect my life, and free expression is part of my life. I can never really silence myself.
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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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They’ve become part of a conspiracy, collaborators of the crime, which is lying to the general public and trying to hide the kind of criminal acts happening in many cases.
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