A Quote by Ai Weiwei

We should use this public sphere and redefine - beyond China's borders - what a government is allowed to do, where its powers end and where the realm of a citizen's privacy begins.

Ai Weiwei

Quote Topics

Allowed Begins Beyond Borders China Citizen End Government Powers Privacy Public Realm Redefine Should Sphere Use

Quote Author

Ai Weiwei
Chinese - Artist
Born: May 18, 1957

Privacy is dead. We live in a world of instantaneous, globalised gossip. The idea that there is a 'private' sphere and a 'public' sphere for world leaders, politicians or anyone in the public eye is slowly disintegrating. The death of privacy will have a profound effect on who our leaders will be in the future.

Gavin Esler

Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or instrument of government - but the reverse... If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom.

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

Jurgen Habermas

women's entry into the public sphere can be seen not merely as the result of contemporary economic pressures, the high rate of divorce, or the success of the feminist movement, but rather as a profound evolutionary response to a pervasive cultural crisis. Feminine principles are entering the public realm because we can no longer afford to restrict them to the private domestic sphere, nor allow a public culture obsessed with Warrior values to control human destiny if we are to survive.

Sally Helgesen

Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what's possible.

Kehinde Wiley

I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.

Camille Paglia

When the Founders thought of democracy, they saw democracy in the political sphere - a sphere strictly limited by the Constitution's well-defined and enumerated powers given the federal government. Substituting democratic decision making for what should be private decision making is nothing less than tyranny dressed up.

Walter E. Williams

The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.

Adam Cohen

In my lifetime, it's the Supreme Court, not Congress, that integrated our public schools, that allowed people of different races to marry, and established the principle that our government should respect the value of privacy of American families. These decisions are the legacy of justices who chose to expand American freedom.

Dick Durbin

An elected government making huge changes with the consent of its people, is being undermined by concentrated powers in unregulated markets-powers which go beyond those of any individual government.

George Papandreou

China always urges that no use or threat of sanctions should be allowed in international relations.

Li Zhaoxing

What you believe in the privacy of your thoughts and what you do in the privacy of your home or house of worship is your business. What you do in the public realm is our collective business.

Gad Saad

No one supposes that the government of the United States is supreme, beyond the sphere plainly defined by the constitution: Neither does any one deny that the State is supreme within its proper sphere of action.

James L. Petigru

The stage has been reached where our armed forces should withdraw beyond the borders It's not the end. It's the start of a new era.

Abdullah Ocalan

In order to have enough of the raw materials...which will be lacking in wartime, we should plan to acquire and use foreign resources existing in our expected sphere of influence, such as Sakhalim, China, and the Southern Pacific.