I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
BILL AYERSLyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.
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Even there, [Barack] Obama’s generals, his Pentagon, they’re telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us.
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Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.
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There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.
BILL AYERS -
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 -
I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.
BILL AYERS -
Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
BILL AYERS -
Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.
BILL AYERS -
They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.
BILL AYERS -
In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn’t can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?
BILL AYERS -
“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
BILL AYERS -
When 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.
BILL AYERS -
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.
BILL AYERS -
Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
BILL AYERS -
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.
BILL AYERS