I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
BILL AYERSSomething about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President – that was exhilarating.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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I find some unity with Ron Paul.
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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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I’m not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he’s doing what he said he would do.
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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 don’t think saying “I was wrong here, I was wrong there” absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
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The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
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One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.
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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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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.
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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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[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.
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Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.
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I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero – I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.
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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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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