Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers
William Charles "Bill" Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the counterculture movement who opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s radical activism and his current work in education reform, curriculum and instruction. In 1969, he co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group with the intent to overthrow imperialism, that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildingsduring the 1960s and 1970s in response to US involvement in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth26 December 1944
CountryUnited States of America
I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.
If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.
One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.
I don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.
I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.
When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
I don't think saying "I was wrong here, I was wrong there" absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
The 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.
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.
Being an activist and an artist - those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.
The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.