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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.

Bill Ayers

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.
BILL AYERS

Kings Prayer Revolution Years
So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that’s part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.
BILL AYERS

Childhood Kids Some Point Younger
If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.
BILL AYERS

Capitalism Logic World
[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently.
BILL AYERS

Organization Powerful Reading
Even there, [Barack] Obama’s generals, his Pentagon, they’re telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us.
BILL AYERS

Country Gay Movement President Rights
I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base – those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.
BILL AYERS

Country Law Military
I was involved in the anti-war movement.
BILL AYERS

Involved Movement War
That’s what [Abraham] Lincoln said. “The white man will always be above the black man. I don’t want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa.”
BILL AYERS

Men Rights Running
I spoke at the University of Georgia, and a whole contingent of Tea Party people in Hell’s Angels regalia came in and sat in the front and scowled at me while I gave my talk.
BILL AYERS

Angel Government Party
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.
BILL AYERS

Broken Numbers People
People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.
BILL AYERS

Insane People Stupid Wondering
I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
BILL AYERS

Driven Ideas Structure
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer–a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
BILL AYERS

Circles Dream House
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.
BILL AYERS

Class Media Soldier
The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
BILL AYERS

Dollar Military Spend Two Years
In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders.
BILL AYERS

Community Diverse People
Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
BILL AYERS

Care Hate Imperialism
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
BILL AYERS

Intellectual Intelligence Learning
I find some unity with Ron Paul.
BILL AYERS

Find Some Unity
I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I’m covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.
BILL AYERS

Book Tattoo Writing
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].
BILL AYERS

Changed Three Years
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
BILL AYERS

Murdered People War
I don’t regret setting bombs.
BILL AYERS

Bombs Regret Settings
Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.
BILL AYERS

Frankly Ground Politician Propulsive
When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.
BILL AYERS

Allure Communism Unions
I didn’t kill innocent people.
BILL AYERS

Innocent Kill People
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
BILL AYERS

Children Fire Military Trillion World

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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