Bill Ayers Quotes

I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.

There's always some room for improvisation.

Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.

You get further if you let your mind run free and do whatever you fancy at that particular time. I don't agree with planning far ahead and saying, 'this week I'm doing this, that week I'm doing that.'

The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.

It's really important, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, to always challenge the conventional wisdom, which is what I've tried to do in all my work.

Definition is the death of discovery.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

But I don't believe in organised politics, organised religion, organised music, organised anything.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

I am anti-ideological. Ideology destroys your freedom. It binds you to the herd.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.

You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge.

A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them.

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

What I had heard about TV is that it's very rigid - that you have to hit your mark, look a certain way, do certain things, that there is no freedom artistically - and that's my worst nightmare. I don't work well in rigid environments.

Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.

I don't want to be married to any ideology, because life is a lot more fluid than that, and I think that we're trained and conditioned in this country to think in teams.

I don't categorise cinema at all. If I am doing this, that means I am limiting myself.

The idea is to be unrestrained by categories.

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

I think I'm always conscious of not letting things fit into a specific box. Being a filmmaker and trying to chart a career, you never want anyone to be able to pigeonhole you into one specific thing.

Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.