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There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

Bill Ayers

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
I’m different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I’m thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They’re not different.
BILL AYERS

Different Principles Thinking
Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
BILL AYERS

Excited Narcissism Writing
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.
BILL AYERS

Car Home People
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.
BILL AYERS

Life Living Mockery.Way
When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
BILL AYERS

Adjustment Gone Identity Life
[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.
BILL AYERS

Black Country Movement
Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.
BILL AYERS

Day Ideals Pentagon
If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
BILL AYERS

Debate Gay Rights
Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
BILL AYERS

Driven Parent Tolerant
And afterwards the head of the group got to the microphone and said, I’m surprised that I agree with almost everything you said, but I’m worried that you’re a big government guy.
BILL AYERS

Agree Government Guy Surprise Worried
It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
BILL AYERS

Amazing Mind Paranoid
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.
BILL AYERS

Ambitious Guy Lovely
Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don’t know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.
BILL AYERS

Kings Prayer Revolution Years
Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we’re talking about.
BILL AYERS

Talking Thinking Writing
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

There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

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There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

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