Top 86 Bill Ayers Quotes
#1. If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.
Bill Ayers
#2. I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.
Bill Ayers
#3. When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
Bill Ayers
#4. I get up every morning and think, today I'm going to make a difference. Today I'm going to end capitalism. Today I'm going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I'm back to work tomorrow, and that's the only way you can do it.
Bill Ayers
#5. We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.
Bill Ayers
#7. I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.
Bill Ayers
#9. If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.
Bill Ayers
#10. I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Bill Ayers
#11. The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
Bill Ayers
#12. I'm different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I'm thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They're not different.
Bill Ayers
#13. I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.
Bill Ayers
#14. I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
Bill Ayers
#15. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, "How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?" It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer
a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
Bill Ayers
#16. We have sex education - I'm for it, I'm not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it's young people's job to invent it themselves. You're not going to teach them; they're going to reinvent it.
Bill Ayers
#17. When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.
Bill Ayers
#18. I don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.
Bill Ayers
#19. Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
Bill Ayers
#21. Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
Bill Ayers
#22. Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
Bill Ayers
#23. I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
Bill Ayers
#24. Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
Bill Ayers
#25. The US is indeed a terrorist nation ... It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
Bill Ayers
#26. I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement..
Bill Ayers
#27. The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.
Bill Ayers
#28. Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.
Bill Ayers
#29. I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
Bill Ayers
#30. To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.
Bill Ayers
#31. The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.
Bill Ayers
#32. The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.
Bill Ayers
#33. Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn't end the war. And that's what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That's our shame.
Bill Ayers
#34. We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act.
Bill Ayers
#35. I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
Bill Ayers
#36. I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.
Bill Ayers
#37. Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
Bill Ayers
#38. I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.
Bill Ayers
#39. I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero - I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.
Bill Ayers
#40. I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.
Bill Ayers
#41. I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill Ayers
#42. If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.
Bill Ayers
#43. Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
Bill Ayers
#44. Chicago '68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I've talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock.
Bill Ayers
#45. I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.
Bill Ayers
#46. I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.
Bill Ayers
#47. Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,
Bill Ayers
#49. The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see.
Bill Ayers
#50. Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue.
Bill Ayers
#51. I don't think saying "I was wrong here, I was wrong there" absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
Bill Ayers
#52. Your body's always going through changes. It's fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.
Bill Ayers
#53. But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
Bill Ayers
#54. You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it - twenty years from now, they'll be marching off into other things and that's still the legacy you leave.
Bill Ayers
#55. Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.
Bill Ayers
#56. Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Bill Ayers
#58. The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.
Bill Ayers
#59. Andrew Breitbart, self-described media mogul, had several screws loose or missing and was the grinning bomb-thrower of the radical right. He was the attack dog kept on a tight leash and brought out on special occasions to hiss and to menace.
Bill Ayers
#60. One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.
Bill Ayers
#61. The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
Bill Ayers
#62. Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.
Bill Ayers
#63. Education is the motor-force of revolution.
Bill Ayers
#64. You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you're not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that's going on. Try to make yourself aware of what's happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
Bill Ayers
#65. Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
Bill Ayers
#66. One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.
Bill Ayers
#67. Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.
Bill Ayers
#68. You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.
Bill Ayers
#69. I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
Bill Ayers
#70. I didn't respond to people thrusting microphones at me and asking me questions that were unanswerable in a sound bite.
Bill Ayers
#71. I was involved in the anti-war movement.
Bill Ayers
#72. Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.
Bill Ayers
#73. There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.
Bill Ayers
#74. It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
Bill Ayers
#75. Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
Bill Ayers
#76. I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.
Bill Ayers
#78. In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying "I'm sorry," is that there's so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
Bill Ayers
#79. Being an activist and an artist - those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
Bill Ayers
#80. I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.
Bill Ayers
#81. I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Bill Ayers
#82. Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
Bill Ayers
#83. To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
Bill Ayers
#84. I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I'm covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.
Bill Ayers
#85. Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don't know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.
Bill Ayers
#86. I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn't do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?
Bill Ayers
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
