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 AYERSIf you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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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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Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
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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.
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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,
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We have sex education – I’m for it, I’m not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it’s young people’s job to invent it themselves. You’re not going to teach them; they’re going to reinvent it.
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It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips – these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?
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If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.
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The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
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I don’t buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.
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Education is a right, it’s a journey, it’s a process, and it’s something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.
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Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
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The day before every revolution that’s ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.
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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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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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I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
BILL AYERS