Bill Ayers Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I have an addiction to caffeine.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I was involved in the anti-war movement.

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

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

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 didn't kill innocent people.

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

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