Bill Ayers Quotes

The idea that you live your life in phases – I’ve never bought that. I feel like I’m the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I’m the same person who joined a fraternity, I’m the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I’m the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.

I have an addiction to caffeine.

I didn’t kill innocent people.

You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values.

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.

I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.

If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.

Education is the motor-force of revolution.

I don’t regret setting bombs.

I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

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.

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

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.

I was involved in the anti-war movement.

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.

I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.

I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.

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.

It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.

We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.

I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero – I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

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.

I didn’t respond to people thrusting microphones at me and asking me questions that were unanswerable in a sound bite.

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.

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I’ve never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

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.

Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.

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.

I find some unity with Ron Paul.

Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.

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.

Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.

Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.

The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it’s like being in a Days Inn; it’s very clean and very nice.

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.

Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.

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.

Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.