Ai Weiwei Quotes

The worst and the best that the internet ever did was give everybody a voice.

The Internet allows me to be more free.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

The Internet exposes a diversity of opinion, experience, and taste we'd been led to believe didn't exist. If you were unusual in 1950 or 1980 - and everyone is unusual in one way or another - you were an isolated anomaly. Now you're a Web ring, a Yahoo category.

The thing I have come to find astonishing is that people from all political sides routinely say that the Internet has to be the model of free speech and freedom.

The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said.

This whole blogging stuff has been bugging me for years. Talk about no filter on things. People feel free to do and say whatever they want with no vetting, with no editing, with nothing.

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. It's very essential values that we all have to protect. But in Chinese society, people are giving up on protecting these values.

In cyberspace, once privacy is breached, it may be breached worldwide. Free speech is not restricted to a street-corner audience, a locker room, or a limited-circulation publication, but travels the world.

People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences.

We didn't expect it to be cool, with people trading URLs instead of phone numbers.

I don't control what people say. I don't control what people put on dot-com or anything else.

I enjoy upsetting the right people. I love poking fun at earnest censors. I want to push the bounds of what can be said on the Internet.

One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.

With the Internet I just love how anything goes, especially in the light of this whole Sachsgate.

While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented.

While we generally believe in free speech and giving everyone as much ability to speak as possible, in practice there are lots of barriers to that, whether it's legal restrictions, technological restrictions or you can't share what you want if you don't have access to the internet.

One of the great things going on right now is social media and you get a real sense, immediately, about what people are feeling and thinking.

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.

There's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.

The object is for everyone to do their own thing, but the thing is to make one's thing the Revolution.

If you were a real fascistic society and you had a vocal minority that was shouting, "Stop this, stop that, stop the other thing," what you would say is, "Let's give them all the drugs they want." In a lot of states, something very much like that happened. They lowered the drinking age to eighteen and said, "Get juiced."

There's a fundamental difference between people who want to see the Internet and say - 'Let's lobotomize and censor parts of it because we need to control it' - and those like us who see the Internet as a method of growing the economy and innovating in front of the world. And we have to actually reconcile those two positions. And we believe that it is much better to protect this crown jewel of civilization, which is the ability for us to communicate and express our ideas freely, than to try to lobotomize it.

To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown.

No one can give us power. If we aren’t part of the process of taking it, we won’t be strong enough to use it.