I’m not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he’s doing what he said he would do.
BILL AYERSYour kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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I do think [Barack Obama’s] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He’s counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.
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The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.
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Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.
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I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, “Action is eloquence,” and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.
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[Barack] Obama doesn’t disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I’m a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
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But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
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Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
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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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It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn’t make mockery of my values. That’s what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.
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The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.
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I’d been arrested many times by then. I’d been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
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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.
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Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting – it’s exciting to be in that dialogue.
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Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
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I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
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I’m writing this book right now called Pallin’ Around, and the subtitle is: “Talking to the Tea Party.” And frankly I find talking to the Tea Party exhilarating, I love it.
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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.
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Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.
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Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.
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I’m wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I’m that way too. So I don’t find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I’m not a liberal.
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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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I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
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I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.
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Lyndon 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.
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So that’s kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would’ve said, “I don’t have any politics. I’m a business person.” Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.
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Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
BILL AYERS