Bill Ayers Quotes

I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - "a real threat," you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.

Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President - that was exhilarating.

There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.

Politicians are conservative by nature.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.

Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why'd they hate him? Because he said things like "I believe in white supremacy."

[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.

I see [Lyndon] Johnson as the war in Vietnam, and the invasion of the Dominican Republic and so on. So I'm not a liberal in that sense, because i think of liberals as part of that establishment.

After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, "You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago." That was the limit of my imagination.

[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. "The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa."

I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.

It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.

There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the '50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan.

I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class.

I was a kid and I studied when I had to [live].

I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.

My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.

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.

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.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

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.

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

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.

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