What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
BILL AYERSOne hundred years from now, we’ll all be dead. It’s hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.
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[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he’s saying, I’m not for gay marriage because I’m a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know,
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When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
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I find some unity with Ron Paul.
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It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips – these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?
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Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
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It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
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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.
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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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Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
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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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Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
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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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I do think [Barack Obama’s] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He’s counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.
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I have an addiction to caffeine.
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Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we’re talking about.
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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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The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
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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,
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
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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.
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I get up every morning and think, today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it.
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It’s the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn’t on the agenda.
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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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I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
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Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
BILL AYERS