Ai Weiwei. “ The Olympics Are a Propaganda Show http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,531883,00.html.” Spiegel, January 29, 2008.
2000-09, 2008
“Am I miffed now? No! It's the best thing that could have happened. We were saved! We were saved!”
Has wounds but still lives (2010)
Context: So I wanted to say she's safe and sound. And for those of you who are still concerned, I saw her this morning for the last time — and her whole face here, which was ravaged and gone, seemingly, was not only healed — there was fur growing back on it. So, that is the end of the story of Has Wounds But Still Lives, and she's in earthly kitty heaven, which is having an owner that loves you to pieces and takes care of you. So — with that in mind, I wanted to thank everyone again. And so many wonderful things are happening all around me — and they don't need to happen to me. But to be given the grace to be a part of it, or to see it — especially to help — is the best thing I could ever have.
2005-09, Address at Stanford University (2005)
Context: I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
Freedom to Connect speech (2012)
Context: There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?
This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted.
“Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have”
As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)
Context: Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.
“At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them.”
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
“So the Jews have problems with finances, only such a thing could happen in Crimea.”
Quoted in Putin Makes Joke About Jews and Money, Speaks Hebrew https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/putin-makes-joke-about-jews-and-money-speaks-hebrew-1.7041106 (20 March 2019)
2019
“Things do not always happen the way I would have wanted, and it's best that I get used to that.”
Source: Like the Flowing River
As quoted in Remarks by President Trump in a Meeting with Supply Chain Distributors on COVID-19 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-meeting-supply-chain-distributors-covid-19/ (March 29, 2020), whitehouse.gov.
2020s, 2020, March
