After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, "You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago." That was the limit of my imagination.
Bill AyersMartin 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 AyersWhether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.
Bill AyersI 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 AyersI'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.
Bill AyersOne of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society. They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.
Bill Ayers