Bill Ayers Quotes

Pick a movement, pick a revolution and join it.

Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.

Democratic rights develop when the ruled demand them and have the means to prevail.

Our Revolution has been the keeper of the flame doing the vital work of building a grassroots movement that leverages the people's agenda.

You can't change the world through the parliamentary system.

We the voice of the young world. We the voice of the people.

The corporate-powered parties are not gonna do it for us, not the greater or the lesser evil. We have to do it for ourselves. And the minute we stand up and stand together, we are unstoppable.

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating ? - those are the things that determine what happens.

Real change never occurs from the top on down, [but] always from the bottom on up.

When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.

The revolution starts at the bottom.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

While the revolution will be certainly televised, it strikes me that there is a strong possibility that the revolution will also be crowd-funded.

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

There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people.

The 'Arab Spring' is the most spectacular example of the dispersal of power.

If you look not just at the Arab Spring, but at what I call the 'Youth Spring' that has started in Europe, young people are starting to find a voice, and they are not looking to the traditional media to reflect that.

Change happens from the bottom up - all of us as individuals deciding that we will and we do have an impact.

I think that rather than saying that Occupy Wall Street has died, we can say that they're in the process of understanding what the long march through alternative institutions might mean.