Quotes from Bill Ayers

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

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

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.

Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why'd they hate him? Because he said things like "I believe in white supremacy."

There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the '50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

I don't regret setting bombs.

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

Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.

It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.

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.

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.

What do we hope to accomplish? What will help us realize our deepest dreams and desires? In what ways is education liberating, and in what ways can schooling be entangling and oppressive? Can learning be cast as a creative act, enjoyable and social, or is it always framed as competitive and brutal? What does it mean to be an educated person? What does it mean to be free? Awakened to fundamental and forbidden questions, a new world of possibilities heaves into view.

There is no sound so sweet as the sound of chains that held folks back for so long falling noisily to the ground. And it's still true: Once we can reimagine and resist in significant numbers, we will rise again, reaching new heights and setting better foundations for living and loving, for building a new world.

Thousands, tens of thousands, and millions right now are mobilizing to stoke those fires from below, to develop a shared faith that injustice can be opposed and justice aspired to, that human solidarity and connectedness can become a living force, that a spirit of courage can be tempered with vast feelings of love and generosity, and that a full and passionate embrace of the lives we're given can be combined with an eagerness to move forward toward a worldwide beloved community.

Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.

Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.

I didn't kill innocent people.

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

Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.