"Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history."

"This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture / Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism."

"Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART'."

"No area of life will be free from this concept in the future. That means that people will recognize the social organism, and they must think within this context. They must not only think about schools but also about the legal system and economic structures. They must always think through the entire social organism..."

"To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren't very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it."

"I go to the typical state school and try to infiltrate it. Yes!.. .One can do something in the institutions in trying to infiltrate them, and outside one can do something to set a model in place.. .One must work with divers methods anyway. One must always carry on with what is possible."

"I just want to encourage everyone to take this into their own hands, the educational process.. .We don't need a brilliant talent somewhere. Precisely the ability that one has at the moment must be put to work."

"School is universal. That means, on the street – when you talk about these things with people at the grocer's; the school is at the grocer's at that moment."

"I want to found a free school for creativity and interdisciplinary research in Düsseldorf [where Beuys was teaching at the Art Academy]. I hope that I will succeed. Everyone can come to me. This school has a legal status.. .First a school is there to develop ability, that is consciousness, then the children will recognize what a future social structure should look like; that means that one can learn a social feeling or a social sense..."

"For example, when we leave [The Documenta in] Kassel, a working group or maybe two working groups will work on things here at Kassel. We want to cause a snow-ball effect. We want to build a network throughout Europe that will work on these things, right? I can only say: we can only do it as well as possible."

"We have to ensure that it is structured organically, so that it functions like a person functions internally, like the organs function.. .First in the examination of the matter. Secondly in that one develops a concept of.. ..a social order that have never existed before. That simply means: to realize freedom, democracy and socialism – free democratic socialism."

"Yes, now we are at the starting-point again. Now we are at our real issue: that we understand ourselves first as sites of education, for information for democracy, for tree-part structure, and so on."

"For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power.. ..the power of evolution. But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current, drastically reduced, understanding of language.. .Beyond language as verbalization lies a world of sound and form impulses, a language of primary sound without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information."

"It is a kind of vehicle, you know. It's a kind of making, spreading out ideas, that is what I think. It spreads out the idea. You must care for information and I personally try to make information available not only in a written way.. .I try also to work with images, with fantasy, with jokes, with humor. It accelerates the discussion of the problem of a new society.. ..so I work coming from the idea of art as the most important means to transform the society."

"QUESTION: A well-known saying of yours asserts that 'Every man is an artist.' If every man is an artist, then why have art academies and art professors at all?"

"'Fat' traverses the path from a chaotically dispersed, undirected energy form to a form. Then it appears in the famous fat corner.. ..now [a wedge of fat in the angle between seat and back of the wooden old Chair, Beuys used in the fat-sculpture, like 'Stuhl mit Fett' (Fet Chair), 1964] intersects the human body in the region that houses certain emotional forces [Beuys laughed, and so did everyone else of the public]."

"My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture.. ..or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone."

"I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognize in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fired only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated."

"I try to go further on over the threshold where modern art ends and anthropological art has to start."

"For instance the idea of intuition, imagination, inspiration.. ..is related in the principle to an invisible world.. ..when I call these drawings 'The Secret Block' then I try to stress this part of reality as the most important part because spiritual existence is firstly.. .I find if we are only confronted with this hard part of the world, this already done part of the world, we are not.. ..related to the whole idea of reality.. ..the mission of the art is to make visible the whole reality.."