We’re actually saying, here’s a principle that I’d like to arc toward. That’s a very different role in life. I didn’t expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn’t expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.
BILL AYERSHating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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The great example, the killer example in history, is of course Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. Read his speeches. Read the debates. Wendell Phillips called him “the great slaver from Illinois.”
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It’s the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
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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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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.
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
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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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It’s the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn’t on the agenda.
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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 knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
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Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
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I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
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Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.
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I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected.
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I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.
BILL AYERS