Ai Weiwei Quotes

A small act is worth a million thoughts.

To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

Politics is like air and water. And you know if there is bad politics. Everyone is polluted. Everyone is unhealthy. See the people walking on the street: how they act.

Choices after waking up: To be true or to lie? To take action or be brainwashed? To be free or be jailed?

The biggest obstacle in interacting with China is the difference in perspectives about basic values. These include issues such as human rights, the concept of law and constitution.

Many people I know – writers, poets – they have all been sentenced not once but sometimes three times after they come out. They serve five or six years, come out another time, and then nine years. Come out again, 12 years. Only because they have a different opinion. They are innocent people, they have beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.

Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

Once you’ve tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country.

If a society cannot even support somebody like me, then people ask: Who is under protection then? That’s why there is such support for me. It is not because I am so beautiful or I am so charming. People feel: This guy is fighting for us.

As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am. As long as I can communicate, I’m not so lonely. If I cannot travel, or do art, or have company, if they take away all my belongings, it doesn’t matter at all.

The leadership knows that you cannot solve the issues of China’s future with the means of the past. The demographic consequences of the one-child policy, the build-up of the welfare state, the jobs for 7 million university graduates every year, the immense corruption: Even some Western governments would have to scramble to find solutions to such problems.

A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.