Bill ayers quotes

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.

I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

Even 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. Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.

It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

[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.

In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn't can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?

I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.

Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence.

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.

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.

There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - "a real threat," you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.

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

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.

[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.

Education is the motor-force of revolution.

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.

I spoke at the University of Georgia, and a whole contingent of Tea Party people in Hell's Angels regalia came in and sat in the front and scowled at me while I gave my talk. And afterwards the head of the group got to the microphone and said, I'm surprised that I agree with almost everything you said, but I'm worried that you're a big government guy.

Who's the big government guy? These labels are nonsense. And the Tea Party, if you want to call them working class, you know, a working-class insurgency from below, they are a mass of contradictions; they don't have a single consistent viewpoint; but part of their impulse is to be wary of government.

It wasn't [Barack] Obama per se; it was the feeling on the ground; it was seeing an old black woman in a wheelchair being wheeled by her son waving a big American flag, and then seeing a guy with his baby in his arms saying, "I didn't want her to miss tonight! I wanted to be able to tell her!" And to see all these people, a Hispanic cop dancing with an old white woman, wow! I mean, that's the world I want to live in, and because it's the world I want to live in, I had a hard time leaving.

I'm not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he's doing what he said he would do.

Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.

[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, I mean, what's he doing now? He's evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ's sake! And this is a guy - the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he's our guy.

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.

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.

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?

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

I find some unity with Ron Paul.

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

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

His [Martin Luther King] last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, is a direct reference to angles, barbarism or socialism.

I'm different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I'm thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They're not different.

I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.

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

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

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.

My brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

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

I see [Lyndon] Johnson as the war in Vietnam, and the invasion of the Dominican Republic and so on. So I'm not a liberal in that sense, because i think of liberals as part of that establishment.

Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President - that was exhilarating.

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

I mean the prime case that you can look at is Martin Luther King, who was only an activist for 13 years. But every year, he became deeper, more concerned, connecting more issues.

We have sex education - I'm for it, I'm not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it's young people's job to invent it themselves. You're not going to teach them; they're going to reinvent it.

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.

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.

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

Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.

I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, "Action is eloquence," and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.

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.

We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.

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.

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.

Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.

I know that's a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.

Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why'd they hate him? Because he said things like "I believe in white supremacy."

The idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on.

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. I'm writing this book right now called Pallin' Around, and the subtitle is: "Talking to the Tea Party." And frankly I find talking to the Tea Party exhilarating, I love it.

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

In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders. They should talk to everyone, they should listen to everyone, and at the end of the day they should have a mind of their own.

I don't know why there's not more activism today. I do think that your generation is twenty times smarter than our generation ever was, but the problem with being smart like you guys is that it can lead you really easily to being cynical, and cynicism is actually a pacifying attitude.

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

One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society. They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.

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.

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

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

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

Politicians are conservative by nature.

The Right said, [Barack Obama] is lying, he's a socialist who pals around with terrorists, he's a secret Muslim and blah blah blah. That was their line. The liberals all said, He's winking at me, I can feel him winking in my direction. He wasn't winking. He said exactly who he was and he's lived that out perfectly.

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.

What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.

When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere.

In some ways a mark of good parenting is that you don't try to make your children into little knockoffs of yourself. None of us went into business. None of us became powerful people like that. All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.

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

There are things about classic liberalism that obviously I'm drawn to and I bet all of you are as well. Those are things like liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights. But the reason that I reject the label is that I grew up cutting my teeth against the liberals.

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.

We were very excited and we brought speakers in – then it so happened that there was a marine recruiter in the center of campus and one of our brothers, one SDS person put up a sign with a quote from the Nuremberg trial and an arrow point at the marine recruiter, saying, "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.

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.

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'm wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I'm that way too. So I don't find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I'm not a liberal.

If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.

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.

All that means to me is that people who have a vision of a better world have a responsibility to open their eyes, to pay attention, to act on what the moment demands, and to be humble about that action.

Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.

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.

The great example, the killer example in history, is of course Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. Read his speeches. Read the debates. Wendell Phillips called him "the great slaver from Illinois."

The 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. Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.

There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.

Now in my view, if you were to line up the Presidents in the order of who made the greatest accomplishments, you'd put Lyndon Johnson in that arena with both Roosevelts probably, and [Abraham] Lincoln and so on. But the idea that Lyndon Johnson was operating as a free agent and coming up with these ideas on his own is nonsense.

[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!

So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.

[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.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person.

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.

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.

When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war. If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.

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

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

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.

That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. "The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa."

The [Vietnam] war's gone on for three years. And we'd thought we'd ended it because we'd done exactly what we were told and what we told ourselves we'd had to do. We had a majority. We were against the war and this created a crisis for democracy and a crisis for the antiwar movement.

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.

I don't regret setting bombs.

One of the great crimes of the Bloomberg/Klein administration [in New York City] is that they've removed themselves from communities, as if communities have nothing to say about what their needs and aspirations are for themselves and for their children.

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

It's not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it's the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.

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.

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.

It's worth remembering that in 1965, something like 20% of Americans were against the war. Something like 70% were for the war. So, it wasn't a popular or an easy thing to do.

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? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - 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.

[Students for a Democratic Society] it's a social democratic program.

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.

Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.

This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.

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.

I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.

Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue.

I do think [Barack Obama's] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He's counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.