If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life – you might want to – when I read these to my students, they think it’s Malcom X because it’s so radical.
BILL AYERSThe only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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We’re actually saying, here’s a principle that I’d like to arc toward. That’s a very different role in life. I didn’t expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn’t expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.
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If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.
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Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.
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I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.
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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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Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
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To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.
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Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
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“I didn’t want her to miss tonight! I wanted to be able to tell her!” And to see all these people, a Hispanic cop dancing with an old white woman, wow! I mean, that’s the world I want to live in, and because it’s the world I want to live in, I had a hard time leaving.
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After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.
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I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that’s always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
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When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.
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Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that’s part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.
BILL AYERS