Bill Ayers Quotes

Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.

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

I don't regret setting bombs.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.

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

I was a militant.

I have an addiction to caffeine.

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

I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

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

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

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.

Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

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.

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 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.

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

I don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.

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.

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

Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.

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.

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 don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.

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

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

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

Education is the motor-force of revolution.

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

I find some unity with Ron Paul.

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

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement..

I was involved in the anti-war movement.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

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.

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

I didn't kill innocent people.

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.