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

More quotes by Bill Ayers

Image
I do think [Barack Obama's] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He's counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.
Bill Ayers
Image
I mean the prime case that you can look at is Martin Luther King, who was only an activist for 13 years. But every year, he became deeper, more concerned, connecting more issues.
Bill Ayers
Image
I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
Bill Ayers
Image
If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.
Bill Ayers
Image
I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.
Bill Ayers
Image
One of the great crimes of the Bloomberg/Klein administration [in New York City] is that they've removed themselves from communities, as if communities have nothing to say about what their needs and aspirations are for themselves and for their children.
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
I don't regret setting bombs.
Bill Ayers
Image
If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
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
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
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
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
Nixon probably was a nice guy.
Bill Ayers
Image
I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
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
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 found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.
Bill Ayers
Image
I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.
Bill Ayers
Image
So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.
Bill Ayers