There are things about classic liberalism that obviously I’m drawn to and I bet all of you are as well. Those are things like liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights. But the reason that I reject the label is that I grew up cutting my teeth against the liberals.
BILL AYERSPart 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.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.
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I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
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And afterwards the head of the group got to the microphone and said, I’m surprised that I agree with almost everything you said, but I’m worried that you’re a big government guy.
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Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
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Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
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You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.
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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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[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
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Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.
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Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
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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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We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can’t the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It’s a captured system.
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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.
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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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[Barack] Obama doesn’t disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I’m a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
BILL AYERS








