It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips – these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?
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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If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.
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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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Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
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One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.
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Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
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I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.
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Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
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[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them – if McCain had been elected we’d still be where we are on gay rights.
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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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One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don’t talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me.
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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.
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I 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.
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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.
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I don’t regret setting bombs.
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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