Bill Ayers Quotes

This man is a war criminal.” My younger brother and I, he was freshman and I was a sophomore, got caught up in the debates that were swirling around the center of campus and the young Trotskyists had put out a fact sheet on Vietnam that was phenomenal.
BILL AYERS

Around Campus Criminal Freshman Mna Sophomore Swirling
[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.
BILL AYERS

Black Country Movement
You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.
BILL AYERS

Change Kids Mind Rising Years
I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected.
BILL AYERS

Country Delighted Elected President
[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them – if McCain had been elected we’d still be where we are on gay rights.
BILL AYERS

Gay Rights Winking
There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.
BILL AYERS

Ideas Political Privilege
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
Without a doubt. It’s woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.
BILL AYERS

Country DNA Hypocrisy
In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we’re told these guys are lazy, they’re uneducated, they don’t care, they don’t have any political instincts – just like the working class in America, apparently – and then suddenly what the hell happened?
BILL AYERS

Class Happened Men Political Rights Street
If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.
BILL AYERS

Capitalism Logic World
We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
BILL AYERS

Eye Fronts Should
I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.
BILL AYERS

America Children Dream
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
BILL AYERS

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

Driven Parent Tolerant
I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.
BILL AYERS

Mythology Persons Thinking
It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It’s kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.
BILL AYERS

Campaign Document Funn Reading Way
I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
BILL AYERS

Country Dropped Heard People
One 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 AYERS

Book Party Writing
After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.
BILL AYERS

Guy Imagination Thinking
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
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.
BILL AYERS

Government Proposal Years
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
One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.
BILL AYERS

Agency Children Thinking
I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
BILL AYERS

Air Book Confident Wall
The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
BILL AYERS

Dollar Military Spend Two Years
If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life – you might want to – when I read these to my students, they think it’s Malcom X because it’s so radical.
BILL AYERS

Country King Thinking
There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.
BILL AYERS

Feelings Leaving relief

Other Famous Personalities