Ai Weiwei Quotes

Since Castro took power, the Cuban people have been denied basic human freedoms. No freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no political freedom. And the regime uses brutality and violence to suppress these freedoms and impose its will.

When men are arrested without any legal basis and for political reasons, it's merely a routine, everyday occurrence in Russia, and hardly anyone has any sympathy.

In the eyes of the world, Malaysia has become a pariah state, a state where anyone can be hauled up and questioned by the police, detained, and charged through abusing laws of the country.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states - or darker periods in American history.

North Koreans are tragically oppressed. Despite the risks to my personal safety, I feel a strong obligation to tell the world about the Orwellian nightmare that North Koreans face.

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day.

Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.

Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.

In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.

A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.

Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.

Dictatorships do cut down on rape, and pillage, not to mention sexual harassment, by the simple expedient of sending people to labour camps for life or cutting off their hands without a trial.

The country is not a democratic state. Therefore we fear that they might carry a recorder in their pocket or there may be bugs in the walls, and you cannot be absolutely sure that you get a straight testimony.

In Iran, there is no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary, no free elections. There is no freedom of religion - not even for Shiites, who are forced by Iran's theocracy to adhere to one narrow set of official rules.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

Silence coerced by law—the argument of force in its worst form.

It is a crime now in my country to talk about the government's crimes.

Every kind and degree of evil of which mankind are susceptible may be inflicted on them by their government.

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

Government troops [police] are worse to the civilians than are the bandits whom the troops are trying to eliminate.

I feel humiliated to belong to a state with no outlook for the future nor ambition, a state that is authoritarian if not despotic, in which there is neither science nor reason….This state holds me back.

To trample democracy with one’s feet and to give power to a single man over almost eighty million people is so terrible that one can very probably tremble over the events which will come here.

I am inclined to believe dictators. Not to is dangerous.

Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.