[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he’s saying, I’m not for gay marriage because I’m a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know,
BILL AYERS[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he’s saying, I’m not for gay marriage because I’m a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know,
BILL AYERSAgitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
BILL AYERSI more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
BILL AYERSThe 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 AYERSEducation is the motor-force of revolution.
BILL AYERSThe end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that.
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 AYERSThe 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.
BILL AYERSEverything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.
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 AYERSThe president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
BILL AYERSNixon probably was a nice guy.
BILL AYERSThe 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.
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 AYERSEven 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 AYERSThe only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
BILL AYERS