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 AYERSWhen you go into a college of education you’ve got aspirations of making a difference in people’s lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan’s home.
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Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don’t know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.
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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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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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If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
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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.
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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.
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Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
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Where’s the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows.
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One 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.
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Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
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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.
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The day before every revolution that’s ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.
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In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders.
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It’s not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it’s the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.
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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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Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
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To be a human being is to suffer. But it’s the unnecessary suffering, it’s the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
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I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
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I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base – those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.
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I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.
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I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.
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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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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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Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
BILL AYERS