black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Bill Ayers

When you go into a college of education you’ve got aspirations of making a difference in people’s lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education.
BILL AYERS

Children Country School
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.
BILL AYERS

Morning Night Thinking
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.
BILL AYERS

Harbors Michigan Rights
We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
BILL AYERS

Eye Fronts Should
Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
BILL AYERS

Figures Thread Trying
Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
BILL AYERS

Driven Parent Tolerant
There are things about classic liberalism that obviously I’m drawn to and I bet all of you are as well. Those are things like liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights. But the reason that I reject the label is that I grew up cutting my teeth against the liberals.
BILL AYERS

Cutting Liberty Rights
It’s the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
BILL AYERS

Community Greatness School
In some ways a mark of good parenting is that you don’t try to make your children into little knockoffs of yourself. None of us went into business. None of us became powerful people like that.
BILL AYERS

Brother Children Teacher
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
BILL AYERS

Absolutely Barack Country Wells
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.
BILL AYERS

Conspiracies Looks Two Wife
The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.
BILL AYERS

Class Media Soldier
To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.
BILL AYERS

Expanding Eye Knowing Universe
Even there, [Barack] Obama’s generals, his Pentagon, they’re telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us.
BILL AYERS

Country Gay Movement President Rights
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.
BILL AYERS

Should Suffering Unnecessary
[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
BILL AYERS

Awakening Firsts Years

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Ayers Quotes