I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
BILL AYERSBut the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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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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Politicians are conservative by nature.
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So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that’s part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.
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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.
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I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base – those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.
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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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We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
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This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
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The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
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In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we’re told these guys are lazy, they’re uneducated, they don’t care, they don’t have any political instincts – just like the working class in America, apparently – and then suddenly what the hell happened?
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The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.
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Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
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There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were – “a real threat,” you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.
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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.
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Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.
BILL AYERS