Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
BILL AYERSWhen [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.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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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.”
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It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn’t make mockery of my values. That’s what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.
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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.
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You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.
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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.
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There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.
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“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
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I was involved in the anti-war movement.
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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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So that’s kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would’ve said, “I don’t have any politics. I’m a business person.” Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.
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Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
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When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war.
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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
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I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.
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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.
BILL AYERS