Bill Ayers
Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.Collection: Home
It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.Collection: Amazing
Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.
Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.
I don't regret setting bombs.
I have an addiction to caffeine.
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
I find some unity with Ron Paul.
I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
I didn't kill innocent people.
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act.
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.
Nixon probably was a nice guy.
Terrorists destroy randomly.
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.
Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
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.
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.
I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
I was involved in the anti-war movement.
I was a militant.
The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.
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.
I didn't respond to people thrusting microphones at me and asking me questions that were unanswerable in a sound bite.
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.Collection: Morning
Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.Collection: Pentagon
Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Past
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.Collection: War
Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.Collection: Kids
I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero - I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.Collection: Hero
I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism.Collection: Morning
If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life - you might want to - –when I read these to my students, they think it's Malcom X because it's so radical. And if you read nothing else - if your viewers read nothing else - then the April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church called "Beyond Vietnam," that's where he says the greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my country. And he connects the triplets of evil, racism, militarism, and materialism, and that connection makes him a radical.Collection: Country
Education is the motor-force of revolution.Collection: Revolution
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.Collection: War
You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Weather
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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Growing Up
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.Collection: Law
If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.Collection: World
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.Collection: Determination
But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.Collection: Boys
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.Collection: New York