black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn’t make mockery of my values. That’s what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.

Bill Ayers

Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we’re talking about.
BILL AYERS

Talking Thinking Writing
It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips – these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?
BILL AYERS

Guy People Real
Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
BILL AYERS

Driven Parent Tolerant
Can we imagine a different world? I can. That’s a world where work is rational, it’s in the common good, and we’re actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.
BILL AYERS

Dream Heaven Real
I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.
BILL AYERS

Morning Thinking Today
I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
BILL AYERS

Less Shared Should Views
That’s where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.
BILL AYERS

Growth Organization War
Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.
BILL AYERS

Frankly Ground Politician Propulsive
We 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 AYERS

Rich Three Want
I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected.
BILL AYERS

Country Delighted Elected President
If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.
BILL AYERS

Common Law Sense White
People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.
BILL AYERS

Insane People Stupid Wondering
Education is the motor-force of revolution.
BILL AYERS

Force Motor Revolution
Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
BILL AYERS

Country President Spring War
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].
BILL AYERS

Changed Three Years
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.
BILL AYERS

Monsters Vision World

It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn’t make mockery of my values. That’s what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn’t make mockery of my values. That’s what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Ayers Quotes