Bill Ayers Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I don't regret setting bombs.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I find some unity with Ron Paul.

Education is the motor-force of revolution.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

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.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn't can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?

Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.

So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.

It's worth remembering that in 1965, something like 20% of Americans were against the war. Something like 70% were for the war. So, it wasn't a popular or an easy thing to do.

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

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.

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

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.