Bill Ayers Quotes

When the students in the South, the blacks, started demonstrating, that was the beginning of the time of students becoming a social force around the world.

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was more politically oriented. Part and parcel of the initial SNCC efforts was to not only go in for voter registration, but for political participation.

It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

I have my rights, not because of Washington suddenly deciding, Strom Thurmond and others, "Hey, let's give certain Americans equal rights." But because of the ardent, unyielding voice of protesters.

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

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.

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

In 1962, the smallest things were upsetting to authority. It wasn't the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't the Anti-war Movement. It was something else, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.

If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially.

During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

We may very well be making history here ... in the presence of the man who is entrusted with the banner of American liberty that was taken from Lincoln when he was shot 95 years ago … Dr. King was almost stabbed to death, has been shot at, has been arrested more often than anybody in the United States, south and north … Dr. King’s life at this moment is in just as great danger as was Lincoln’s. And he has to walk with care if he is to continue to lead this crusade

Until the Negro votes on a large scale, we will have to rely more and more on mass direct action as the one realistic political weapon.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

Historically, mass demonstrations have worked best at shifting public opinion and pressuring the powers-that-be when organizers highlighted one concrete demand: 'Bring Our Boys Home from Vietnam'; 'End Segregation Now'; 'Support Women's Right to Choose.'

Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.

These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking round.