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
Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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.
I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.
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.
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
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.
Education is the motor-force of revolution.
It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
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.
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
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.
I don't regret setting bombs.