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 AYERSI would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.
BILL AYERS -
Terrorists destroy randomly.
BILL AYERS -
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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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 -
It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
BILL AYERS -
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.
BILL AYERS -
I didn’t kill innocent people.
BILL AYERS -
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.
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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.
BILL AYERS -
Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
BILL AYERS -
They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.
BILL AYERS -
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.
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.
BILL AYERS -
One of the things that’s complicated about writing anything is that it’s an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.
BILL AYERS -
I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.
BILL AYERS