The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
BILL AYERSWhen someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.
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I wasn’t part of John Kennedy’s vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson’s. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
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Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
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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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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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After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.
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You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.
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In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying “I’m sorry,” is that there’s so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
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Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President – that was exhilarating.
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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
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All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.
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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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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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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.
BILL AYERS