Quote

I know that's a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.

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
Eyes
Doubting
Eye
Repeat
Action
Repeats
Littles
Humble
Anything
Lifetime
Little
Coming
Weatherman
Mean
Doubt
Weathermen
Open
Jarring

More quotes by Bill Ayers

Image
I didn't kill innocent people.
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 think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
Bill Ayers
Image
I was arrested 1965. I had come back from the merchant marines, got into conversations about the war. I had never heard of Vietnam until I was in the merchant marines in constitution square in Athens, and I picked up the New York Herald or the International Herald Tribune and there was my first introduction of the word Vietnam.
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
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
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.
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
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
Now in my view, if you were to line up the Presidents in the order of who made the greatest accomplishments, you'd put Lyndon Johnson in that arena with both Roosevelts probably, and [Abraham] Lincoln and so on. But the idea that Lyndon Johnson was operating as a free agent and coming up with these ideas on his own is nonsense.
Bill Ayers
Image
That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa.
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 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
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Bill Ayers
Image
Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
Bill Ayers
Image
It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.
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
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
Bill Ayers
Image
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
Bill Ayers