I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
BILL AYERSI don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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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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“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
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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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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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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.
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I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
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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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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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When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war.
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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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That’s in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn’t work, but it’s very hard to predict what will work.
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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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Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.
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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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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.
BILL AYERS








