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[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

Bill Ayers

Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
BILL AYERS

Driven Parent Tolerant
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
BILL AYERS

Activism Art Contradictory
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.
BILL AYERS

Should Suffering Unnecessary
What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.
BILL AYERS

Community Needs Teaching
Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
BILL AYERS

Hate Minorities War
Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
BILL AYERS

Impossible Inevitable Revolution
If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.
BILL AYERS

Common Law Sense White
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.
BILL AYERS

Christmas Community Evolving Jump People Sake
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.
BILL AYERS

Eye People War
Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.
BILL AYERS

Body Changes Fattening Going Through
I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.
BILL AYERS

Unifying Wiser Wish
I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
BILL AYERS

Driven Ideas Structure
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

Assisted Congratulations Kings War
Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
BILL AYERS

Democratic Society Student Students
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 AYERS

Baby Mean Son Wheelchair Wheeled
I didn’t kill innocent people.
BILL AYERS

Innocent Kill People

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

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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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