110+ Bill Ayers Quotes On Education, Culture And Slavery

Professor Bill Ayers is an American elementary education theorist, activist, and former professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is best known for his involvement in the Weather Underground, a radical left-wing organization active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is also known for his advocacy of progressive education and his support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Bill Ayers on education, leadership, culture.

Top 10 Bill Ayers Quotes

1. Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
2. Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.
3. The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
4. Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
5. You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.
6. I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.
7. I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.
8. The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.
• It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
• My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.
• Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
• [Students for a Democratic Society] it's a social democratic program.
• Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.
• Terrorists destroy randomly.
• What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
• Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
• If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.

Bill Ayers Quotes About Education

We have sex education - I'm for it, I'm not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it's young people's job to invent it themselves. You're not going to teach them; they're going to reinvent it. — Bill Ayers

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

Education is the motor-force of revolution. — Bill Ayers

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

Bill Ayers Quotes About Activist

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle? — Bill Ayers

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end. — Bill Ayers

Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don't know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday. — Bill Ayers

The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see. — Bill Ayers

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

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

Bill Ayers Quotes About Live

You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you're not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that's going on. Try to make yourself aware of what's happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act. — Bill Ayers

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

I was a kid and I studied when I had to [live]. — Bill Ayers

I more or less shared the view that life should be lived. — Bill Ayers

It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn't make mockery of my values. That's what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me. — Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers Quotes About Life

We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy. — Bill Ayers

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves. — Bill Ayers

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity. — Bill Ayers

You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it - twenty years from now, they'll be marching off into other things and that's still the legacy you leave. — Bill Ayers

The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam. — Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers Famous Quotes And Sayings

I get up every morning and think, today I'm going to make a difference. Today I'm going to end capitalism. Today I'm going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I'm back to work tomorrow, and that's the only way you can do it. — Bill Ayers

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

To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe. — Bill Ayers

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

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

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

I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election. — Bill Ayers

[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them - if McCain had been elected we'd still be where we are on gay rights. — Bill Ayers

The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret. — Bill Ayers

I'm different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I'm thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They're not different. — Bill Ayers

Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue. — Bill Ayers

[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently. It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It's kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way. — Bill Ayers

In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders. They should talk to everyone, they should listen to everyone, and at the end of the day they should have a mind of their own. — Bill Ayers

When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere. — Bill Ayers

I'm anti-establishment. So all the labels, the reason that I keep joking and rejecting this idea that I'm liberal, well partly that's because I think of myself as a radical, and by that I mean, not even in the terms of Left-Right that you might imagine - but someone who wants to go to the root of problems. — Bill Ayers

When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad. — Bill Ayers

The end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that. — Bill Ayers

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful. — Bill Ayers

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world. — Bill Ayers

I spoke at the University of Georgia, and a whole contingent of Tea Party people in Hell's Angels regalia came in and sat in the front and scowled at me while I gave my talk. And afterwards the head of the group got to the microphone and said, I'm surprised that I agree with almost everything you said, but I'm worried that you're a big government guy. — Bill Ayers

I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas. — Bill Ayers

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

There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling. — Bill Ayers

Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy. — Bill Ayers

Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating. — Bill Ayers

I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968]. — Bill Ayers

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

I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then. — Bill Ayers

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan. — Bill Ayers

It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda. — Bill Ayers

The idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on. — Bill Ayers

It's not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it's the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson. — Bill Ayers

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people. — Bill Ayers

I don't think saying "I was wrong here, I was wrong there" absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven. — Bill Ayers

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans. — Bill Ayers

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip. — Bill Ayers

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

Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable. — Bill Ayers

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

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

I don't know that I ever bought into the "American dream." I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the '50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege. — Bill Ayers

One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society. They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait. — Bill Ayers

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

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities. — Bill Ayers

Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail. — Bill Ayers

I'm not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he's doing what he said he would do. — Bill Ayers

I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in. — Bill Ayers

I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class. — Bill Ayers

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

The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice. — Bill Ayers

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

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

Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President - that was exhilarating. — Bill Ayers

It's worth remembering that in 1965, something like 20% of Americans were against the war. Something like 70% were for the war. So, it wasn't a popular or an easy thing to do. — Bill Ayers

Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic. — Bill Ayers

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

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

The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person. — Bill Ayers

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - people camped out at his house, and wondering who's coming to visit, who's going to be the Secretary of State - that all struck me as inane and stupid. — Bill Ayers

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

Chicago '68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I've talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock. — Bill Ayers

[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

I see [Lyndon] Johnson as the war in Vietnam, and the invasion of the Dominican Republic and so on. So I'm not a liberal in that sense, because i think of liberals as part of that establishment. — Bill Ayers

You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't! — Bill Ayers

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped. — Bill Ayers

[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician. — Bill Ayers

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

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure. — Bill Ayers

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

Fairly apolitical. Kind of aspiring to participate in life. I'm 18-19 years old. Wanting to dive into the world and finding the world opening for me in ways that were unimaginable. I didn't sleep for the whole first year at university because it was too much going on. Too many films to see, too many concerts to go to. — Bill Ayers

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

I didn't kill innocent people. — Bill Ayers

We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act. — Bill Ayers

I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero - I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters. — Bill Ayers

I have an addiction to caffeine. — Bill Ayers

Your body's always going through changes. It's fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it. — Bill Ayers

What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood. — Bill Ayers

The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases. — Bill Ayers

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

I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism. — Bill Ayers

Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence. — Bill Ayers

There are things about classic liberalism that obviously I'm drawn to and I bet all of you are as well. Those are things like liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights. But the reason that I reject the label is that I grew up cutting my teeth against the liberals. — Bill Ayers

If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die. — Bill Ayers

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

Even there, [Barack] Obama's generals, his Pentagon, they're telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us. Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do. — Bill Ayers

Andrew Breitbart, self-described media mogul, had several screws loose or missing and was the grinning bomb-thrower of the radical right. He was the attack dog kept on a tight leash and brought out on special occasions to hiss and to menace. — Bill Ayers

Life Lessons by Bill Ayers

1. Bill Ayers' work emphasizes the importance of education and social justice, emphasizing the need to create equitable learning opportunities for all students, regardless of their background.
2. He encourages teachers to create an environment of respect and understanding, and to challenge students to think critically and engage in meaningful dialogue.
3. He also advocates for a more holistic approach to teaching, focusing on the whole child and their individual needs, rather than just their academic performance.