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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 Ayers

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
BILL AYERS

Hate Minorities War
Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.
BILL AYERS

Country Couple Jail Suddenly
I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
BILL AYERS

Mean Roots Thinking
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

Country Exhilarating Long
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.”
BILL AYERS

Believe Hate White
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
BILL AYERS

Activism Art Contradictory
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
BILL AYERS

Murdered People War
It wasn’t [Barack] Obama per se; it was the feeling on the ground; it was seeing an old black woman in a wheelchair being wheeled by her son waving a big American flag, and then seeing a guy with his baby in his arms saying,
BILL AYERS

Baby Mean Son Wheelchair Wheeled
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.
BILL AYERS

Change Kids Mind Rising Years
To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.
BILL AYERS

Expanding Eye Knowing Universe
[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
BILL AYERS

Awakening Firsts Years
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.
BILL AYERS

Country Eisenhower Moderate Republican
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

Egalitarianism War White
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

Go Letting World Writing
Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
BILL AYERS

Impossible Inevitable Revolution
I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
BILL AYERS

Country Dropped Heard People

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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