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.
BILL AYERS[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn’t elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months.
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If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.
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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.
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There are things about classic liberalism that obviously I’m drawn to and I bet all of you are as well. Those are things like liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights. But the reason that I reject the label is that I grew up cutting my teeth against the liberals.
BILL AYERS -
Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President – that was exhilarating.
BILL AYERS -
I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.
BILL AYERS -
When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.
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Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
BILL AYERS -
I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn’t do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
BILL AYERS -
I mean, what’s he doing now? He’s evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ’s sake! And this is a guy – the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he’s our guy.
BILL AYERS -
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.
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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
BILL AYERS -
Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
BILL AYERS -
When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
BILL AYERS