Top 70 Bill Ayers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

2. “You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values.”

— Bill Ayers

3. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

4. “If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

6. “Education is the motor-force of revolution.”

— Bill Ayers

7. “Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I’ve never considered it a neutral or passive profession.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

10. “I have an addiction to caffeine.”

— Bill Ayers

11. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

12. “Nixon probably was a nice guy.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

14. “I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.”

— Bill Ayers

15. “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.”

— Bill Ayers

16. “Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.”

— Bill Ayers

17. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

18. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

19. “We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.”

— Bill Ayers

20. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

21. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

22. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

23. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

24. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

25. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

26. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

28. “If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

30. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

31. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

32. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

34. “I don’t regret setting bombs.”

— Bill Ayers

35. “I was involved in the anti-war movement.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

38. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

39. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

40. “I didn’t kill innocent people.”

— Bill Ayers

41. “Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.”

— Bill Ayers

42. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

43. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

44. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers

46. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

47. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

48. “I don’t think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.”

— Bill Ayers

49. “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.”

— Bill Ayers

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

— Bill Ayers