The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
BILL AYERSEvery revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
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All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.
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I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I’m covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.
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It’s the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn’t on the agenda.
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We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
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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.
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We have sex education – I’m for it, I’m not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it’s young people’s job to invent it themselves. You’re not going to teach them; they’re going to reinvent it.
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It wasn’t [Barack] Obama per se; it was the feeling on the ground; it was seeing an old black woman in a wheelchair being wheeled by her son waving a big American flag, and then seeing a guy with his baby in his arms saying,
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Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why’d they hate him? Because he said things like “I believe in white supremacy.”
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I’m wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I’m that way too. So I don’t find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I’m not a liberal.
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The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.
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Without a doubt. It’s woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.
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If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
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I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
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Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting – it’s exciting to be in that dialogue.
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I do think [Barack Obama’s] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He’s counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.
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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.
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[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.
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I mean, what’s he doing now? He’s evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ’s sake! And this is a guy – the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he’s our guy.
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The US is indeed a terrorist nation. …It’s also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
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Nixon probably was a nice guy.
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Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
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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.
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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.
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I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
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I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
BILL AYERS