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.
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.
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.
You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it - twenty years from now, they'll be marching off into other things and that's still the legacy you leave.
The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
I have an addiction to caffeine.
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 would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
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.
In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying "I'm sorry," is that there's so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.
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.