I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill AyersI wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
Bill Ayers[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.
Bill AyersWhen 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 AyersIn a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders. They should talk to everyone, they should listen to everyone, and at the end of the day they should have a mind of their own.
Bill Ayers