I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, “Action is eloquence,” and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.
BILL AYERSI said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, “Action is eloquence,” and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.
BILL AYERSI 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.
BILL AYERSI was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.
BILL AYERSKill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.
BILL AYERSTwo thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
BILL AYERSI 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 AYERSIn 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.
BILL AYERSIf you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
BILL AYERSSo that’s kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would’ve said, “I don’t have any politics. I’m a business person.” Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.
BILL AYERSOne question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.
BILL AYERSFrankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.
BILL AYERSBeing arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.
BILL AYERSI suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
BILL AYERSThe idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on.
BILL AYERSWe just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can’t the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It’s a captured system.
BILL AYERSWhen [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.
BILL AYERS