Top 204 Quotes & Sayings by Bill Ayers

I didn't respond to people thrusting microphones at me and asking me questions that were unanswerable in a sound bite.

It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.

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.

Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.

Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

I was involved in the anti-war movement.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.

I didn't kill innocent people.

Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.

I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.

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 like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock.

I don't regret setting bombs.

Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

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.

We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act.

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.

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 majority of the people in the country supported the war then.

I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.

I was a militant.

I have an addiction to caffeine.

Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.

I find some unity with Ron Paul.

I'm anti-establishment. So all the labels, the reason that I keep joking and rejecting this idea that I'm liberal, well partly that's because I think of myself as a radical, and by that I mean, not even in the terms of Left-Right that you might imagine - but someone who wants to go to the root of problems.

The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.

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.

The 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.

The US is indeed a terrorist nation. ...It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.

Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.

You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.

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.

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.

Education is the motor-force of revolution.

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism.

Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.

Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn't end the war. And that's what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That's our shame.

The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.

I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.

I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.

[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently. 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.

Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero - I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.

I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.

If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.

It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.

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. And if you read nothing else - if your viewers read nothing else - then the April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church called "Beyond Vietnam," that's where he says the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my country. And he connects the triplets of evil, racism, militarism, and materialism, and that connection makes him a radical.

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.

I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.

Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.