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[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently.

Bill Ayers

There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were – “a real threat,” you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.
BILL AYERS

Lenses Moments Real
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
BILL AYERS

Intellectual Intelligence Learning
Education is a right, it’s a journey, it’s a process, and it’s something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.
BILL AYERS

Hard Journey Process
I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
BILL AYERS

Country Dropped Heard People
“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
BILL AYERS

Country Easy Hated People War
This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
BILL AYERS

Black Cities Trials
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 wasn’t part of John Kennedy’s vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson’s. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
BILL AYERS

Monsters Vision World
Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
BILL AYERS

Hate Minorities War
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
What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
BILL AYERS

Family Mainstream Moderate
When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.
BILL AYERS

Dad Mom Social Views Voted Worker
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
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

Book Party Writing
It’s the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn’t on the agenda.
BILL AYERS

Agendas Height War
Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
BILL AYERS

Busy Injustice Mean

[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently.

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[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently.

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Popular Authors

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