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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.

Bill Ayers

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
BILL AYERS

Hate Minorities War
There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.
BILL AYERS

Ideas Political Privilege
When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
BILL AYERS

Adjustment Gone Identity Life
I have an addiction to caffeine.
BILL AYERS

Addiction Caffeine Habit
I don’t think saying “I was wrong here, I was wrong there” absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
BILL AYERS

Absolves Heaven Thinking
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.”
BILL AYERS

Believe Hate White
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.
BILL AYERS

Change Hard Social Work
[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
BILL AYERS

Awakening Firsts Years
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

Class Media Soldier
In some ways a mark of good parenting is that you don’t try to make your children into little knockoffs of yourself. None of us went into business. None of us became powerful people like that.
BILL AYERS

Brother Children Teacher
I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.
BILL AYERS

Drop Lasted Marine Merchant Year
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 AYERS

Cutting Liberty Rights
The great example, the killer example in history, is of course Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. Read his speeches. Read the debates. Wendell Phillips called him “the great slaver from Illinois.”
BILL AYERS

Example Illinois Speech
[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,
BILL AYERS

Christian Mean Running
I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero – I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.
BILL AYERS

Hero Should Thinking
What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
BILL AYERS

Family Mainstream Moderate

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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