Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers
William Charles "Bill" Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the counterculture movement who opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s radical activism and his current work in education reform, curriculum and instruction. In 1969, he co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group with the intent to overthrow imperialism, that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildingsduring the 1960s and 1970s in response to US involvement in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth26 December 1944
CountryUnited States of America
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.
I didn't kill innocent people.
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
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 was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
I was involved in the anti-war movement.
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.
I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
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.
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.
I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.