Bill Ayers Quotes - Page 8

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.

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 voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.

The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.

One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.

I don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.

Andrew Breitbart, self-described media mogul, had several screws loose or missing and was the grinning bomb-thrower of the radical right. He was the attack dog kept on a tight leash and brought out on special occasions to hiss and to menace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.

We should open our eyes, see what's in front of us, and act.

I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.

The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn; it's very clean and very nice.

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.

One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

Being an activist and an artist - those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.

When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.

To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.

If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.