Bill Ayers Quotes - Page 7

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.

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.

I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

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.

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 was involved in the anti-war movement.

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.

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.

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.

I have an addiction to caffeine.

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

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

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.

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.

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

I didn't kill innocent people.

Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.

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 taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn't do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?

I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I'm covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.

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.

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