Bill Ayers Quotes

44 quotes in 470 categories

• I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
• I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
• Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
• Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
• I find some unity with Ron Paul.
• I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
• I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
• I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
• I was involved in the anti-war movement.
• I 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.
• Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.
• Nixon probably was a nice guy.
• Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.
• Terrorists destroy randomly.
• The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.
• Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
• We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act.
• Chicago '68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I've talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt…
• I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the…
• I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement..

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