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
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 don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.
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.
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.
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.
I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.
I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism.
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.
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.
We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act.