Quote

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

Bill Ayers

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill Ayers
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 26
Autobiographer
Journalist
Peace Activist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Glen Ellyn
Illinois
William Charles Bill Ayers
William Charles Ayers
Book
Leapt
Confinement
Breathed
Deliverance
Walls
Air
Wall
Books

More quotes by Bill Ayers

Image
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
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?
Bill Ayers
Image
Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
Bill Ayers
Image
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Bill Ayers
Image
I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.
Bill Ayers
Image
Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
Bill Ayers
Image
I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
Bill Ayers
Image
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, How shall we respond to the dreams of youth? It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer--a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
Bill Ayers
Image
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
Bill Ayers
Image
It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
Bill Ayers