After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.
BILL AYERSBeginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.
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[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
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Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.
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The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
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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.
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We have sex education – I’m for it, I’m not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it’s young people’s job to invent it themselves. You’re not going to teach them; they’re going to reinvent it.
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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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Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.
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Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.
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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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[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.
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What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.
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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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I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
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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.
BILL AYERS