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One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.

Bill Ayers

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
BILL AYERS

Air Book Confident Wall
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
BILL AYERS

Activism Art Contradictory
I get up every morning and think, today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it.
BILL AYERS

Morning Night Thinking
They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.
BILL AYERS

Children Country Kind May Ruling Sense
I’d been arrested many times by then. I’d been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
BILL AYERS

Changed Three Years
This man is a war criminal.” My younger brother and I, he was freshman and I was a sophomore, got caught up in the debates that were swirling around the center of campus and the young Trotskyists had put out a fact sheet on Vietnam that was phenomenal.
BILL AYERS

Around Campus Criminal Freshman Mna Sophomore Swirling
Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
BILL AYERS

Care Hate Imperialism
Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting – it’s exciting to be in that dialogue.
BILL AYERS

Fun Real Teaching
I didn’t kill innocent people.
BILL AYERS

Innocent Kill People
Education is the motor-force of revolution.
BILL AYERS

Force Motor Revolution
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer–a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
BILL AYERS

Circles Dream House
“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
BILL AYERS

Country Easy Hated People War
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.
BILL AYERS

Feelings Leaving relief
[Barack] Obama doesn’t disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I’m a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
BILL AYERS

Campaigns Compromise Politician
I’m wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I’m that way too. So I don’t find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I’m not a liberal.
BILL AYERS

Government Party People
I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.
BILL AYERS

Unifying Wiser Wish

One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.

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One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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