1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows Quotes

“the revolution needed to have enemies—without them, people would feel a deep unease.”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—it is present also, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans. It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don’t believe in, simply to fall in line with the prevailing narrative and make a superficial public statement.”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“Tolerating the distortion of history is the first step toward tolerating humiliation in real life.”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“A poet, he argued, is different from somebody who simply writes poetry. A poet is loyal to his own experience and does not write about things outside his own understanding, whereas somebody who writes poetry simply puts together sentences, whose words he arranges in separate lines. Without fresh colors, without luster, without images, he asked, where is a poem’s artistic life?”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir