Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.
BILL AYERSI came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that’s always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
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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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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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
BILL AYERS -
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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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 -
Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why’d they hate him? Because he said things like “I believe in white supremacy.”
BILL AYERS -
When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
BILL AYERS -
Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
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In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we’re told these guys are lazy, they’re uneducated, they don’t care, they don’t have any political instincts – just like the working class in America, apparently – and then suddenly what the hell happened?
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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,
BILL AYERS -
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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I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.
BILL AYERS -
“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
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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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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
BILL AYERS