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
We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act.
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.
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.
I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero - I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.
Terrorists destroy randomly.
Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
I have an addiction to caffeine.
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 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.
I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement..
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.
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.
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, "How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?" It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer--a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.