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,
BILL AYERSInjustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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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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It’s not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it’s the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.
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But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
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One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don’t talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me.
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Can we imagine a different world? I can. That’s a world where work is rational, it’s in the common good, and we’re actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.
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Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer–a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
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I don’t regret setting bombs.
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One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.
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Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.
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To be a human being is to suffer. But it’s the unnecessary suffering, it’s the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
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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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[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
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I’m different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I’m thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They’re not different.
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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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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 AYERS