Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill Ayers
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: December 26
Autobiographer
Journalist
Peace Activist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Glen Ellyn
Illinois
William Charles Bill Ayers
William Charles Ayers
Anyone
Ass
Ever
Inevitable
Every
Thinks
Thinking
Revolution
Like
Nobody
Todd
Head
Rosa
Impossible
Activism
Happened
Parks

More quotes by Bill Ayers

Image
[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
Bill Ayers
Image
This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
Bill Ayers
Image
Without a doubt. It's woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.
Bill Ayers
Image
Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
Bill Ayers
Image
It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
Bill Ayers
Image
[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
Bill Ayers
Image
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.
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
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
Bill Ayers
Image
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
Bill Ayers
Image
It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.
Bill Ayers
Image
My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, We all hated the war in Vietnam. Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
Bill Ayers
Image
What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
Bill Ayers
Image
I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Bill Ayers
Image
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill Ayers
Image
After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago. That was the limit of my imagination.
Bill Ayers
Image
There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - a real threat, you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.
Bill Ayers
Image
I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
Bill Ayers
Image
All that means to me is that people who have a vision of a better world have a responsibility to open their eyes, to pay attention, to act on what the moment demands, and to be humble about that action.
Bill Ayers
Image
My brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.
Bill Ayers