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.
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.
People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.
One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don’t talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me.
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.
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.”
One of the things that’s complicated about writing anything is that it’s an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.
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.”
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.
I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer–a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.
![Bill Ayers Quote - 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.”](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/frederick-douglass-ran-a-primary-campaign-against-.jpg)
