You take a weakness and start making it stronger.. You don't have to build your strengths - that you already possess... It is your weakness that needs the exercise
Even though everybody who looked at me would call me a Chinese artist, that's the 1980s. New York in the '80s was not so interesting. I think it's quite narrow-minded. There wasn't much encouragement or opportunities for any artist - not just Chinese artists.
We have come from a time of the large-scale, planned, Al Qaeda-style attacks, to the encouragement of lone wolves: Fort Hood, Chattanooga. To the encouragement of people to act on their own.
Man's freedom is never in being saved from troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy.
I choose to rise up out of that storm and see that in moments of desperation, fear, and helplessness, each of us can be a rainbow of hope, doing what we can to extend ourselves in kindness and grace to one another. And I know for sure that there is no them - there's only us.
Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.
Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on sides of the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the main tenets of justice.