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: 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
Thinking
Revolution
Like
Nobody
Todd
Head
Rosa
Impossible
Activism
Happened
Parks
Anyone
Ass
Ever
Inevitable
Every
Thinks

More quotes by Bill Ayers

Image
We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can't the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It's a captured system.
Bill Ayers
Image
I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Bill Ayers
Image
I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn't do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?
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
Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
Bill Ayers
Image
The US is indeed a terrorist nation. ...It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
Bill Ayers
Image
I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
Bill Ayers
Image
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course they can also be contradictory.
Bill Ayers
Image
I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
Bill Ayers
Image
Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into a decent, compassionate, lovely person pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.
Bill Ayers
Image
I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.
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
The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.
Bill Ayers
Image
Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
Bill Ayers
Image
Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
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
I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
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
I have an addiction to caffeine.
Bill Ayers
Image
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
Bill Ayers