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One of the things that’s complicated about writing anything is that it’s an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

Bill Ayers

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
BILL AYERS

Hate Minorities War
One of the things that’s complicated about writing anything is that it’s an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.
BILL AYERS

Go Letting World Writing
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?
BILL AYERS

Class Happened Men Political Rights Street
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.
BILL AYERS

Christmas Community Evolving Jump People Sake
It’s the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn’t on the agenda.
BILL AYERS

Agendas Height War
That’s in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn’t work, but it’s very hard to predict what will work.
BILL AYERS

Change Hard Social Work
I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
BILL AYERS

Lectures Silent Writing
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
I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
BILL AYERS

Driven Ideas Structure
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.
BILL AYERS

Rights Support War
I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
BILL AYERS

Less Shared Should Views
If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
BILL AYERS

Debate Gay Rights
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
It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
BILL AYERS

Amazing Mind Paranoid
I have an addiction to caffeine.
BILL AYERS

Addiction Caffeine Habit
To be a human being is to suffer. But it’s the unnecessary suffering, it’s the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
BILL AYERS

Should Suffering Unnecessary
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
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.
BILL AYERS

Country President Spring 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
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.
BILL AYERS

Country Law Military
When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.
BILL AYERS

Allure Communism Unions
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.
BILL AYERS

Growth Organization War
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?
BILL AYERS

Guy People Real
Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
BILL AYERS

Artist Together Two
Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why’d they hate him? Because he said things like “I believe in white supremacy.”
BILL AYERS

Believe Hate White
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
Education is the motor-force of revolution.
BILL AYERS

Force Motor Revolution

One of the things that’s complicated about writing anything is that it’s an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

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One of the things that’s complicated about writing anything is that it’s an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

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Popular Authors

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