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 AYERSTwo thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.
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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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Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
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In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders.
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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.
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It’s worth remembering that in 1965, something like 20% of Americans were against the war. Something like 70% were for the war. So, it wasn’t a popular or an easy thing to do.
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When [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.
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I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
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It’s not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it’s the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.
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The US is indeed a terrorist nation. …It’s also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
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Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.
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I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.
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Terrorists destroy randomly.
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That’s where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.
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The rhythm of being an activist today involves a pretty simple rhythm. You have to open your eyes to the reality before you. You have to look and see.
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[Barack] Obama doesn’t disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I’m a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
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I mean, what’s he doing now? He’s evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ’s sake! And this is a guy – the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he’s our guy.
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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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Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.
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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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So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan’s home.
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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
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[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he’s saying, I’m not for gay marriage because I’m a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know,
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It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
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I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.
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I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
BILL AYERS