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 didn't kill innocent people.
I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don't know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.
I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.
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.
Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
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.
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.
The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.
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.