Ai Weiwei Quotes

… nearly universal is a never-ending effort to balance the rights of individuals with the needs that, in the modern world, it seems only government can meet.

The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can't return even if it wants to.

Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

Democratic governments are not delivering on their promises, which is partly due to the fact that governments are less powerful than they were after the Second World War. There were fewer governments then, but they actually had more political power.

We should know at least the broad strokes of the powers that the government's claiming in our name, and using allegedly, on our behalf. And also against us as well.

It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free.

If government can give you rights, government can take them away from you.

Allowing our government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which this country was conceived: the inviolable dignity of human persons.

We need to make clear the federal government does not have authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without due process or, for that matter, to use lethal force on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil if they don't pose imminent threats.

Gun control means control. It means control for the government and the government starts controlling the people.

If a strong government finds that it can, with impunity, destroy a weak people, then the hour has struck for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment.

Government has a legitimate sphere of operation. The problem arises when that sphere continually expands, encompassing areas where government lacks legitimacy.

We believe that government in Britain is there to protect people from terrorism and from the worst criminality, but never at the expense of our civil liberties and the basic tenets of our legal system.

No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.

When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual, it can be terrifying.

Congress has no authority to interfere in the internal regulations of particular States, relative to the instruction of slaves in the principles of morality and religion; to their comfortable clothing and accommodations, and subsistence; to the regulation of their marriages, and the prevention of the violation of their rights thereof.

Nations have lost their traditional exclusive jurisdiction over their treatment of their citizens.

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

Government is nothing but regulated force; force is its appropriate claim upon your attention

Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of government; and it is equally undeniable that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights, in order to vest it with requisite powers.

In a sense, the police power is but another name for the power of government.

There is an urgent necessity that our system of international law not allow heads of state to violate the fundamental rights of their citizens or their neighbor with impunity. But a consistently amoral U. S. foreign policy has made this necessity all the more difficult to address.

Unfettered discretion [in obtaining information could] alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.