I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
BILL AYERSStudents for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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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.
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And afterwards the head of the group got to the microphone and said, I’m surprised that I agree with almost everything you said, but I’m worried that you’re a big government guy.
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
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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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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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Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
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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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The end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that.
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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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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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I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
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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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My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer’s, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen,
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That’s in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn’t work, but it’s very hard to predict what will work.
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If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.
BILL AYERS







