Bill Ayers War Quotations

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

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.

Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence.

I was involved in the anti-war movement.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'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.

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