I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I’m covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.
BILL AYERSThe end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
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When you go into a college of education you’ve got aspirations of making a difference in people’s lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education.
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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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We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can’t the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It’s a captured system.
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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.
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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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Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
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The great example, the killer example in history, is of course Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. Read his speeches. Read the debates. Wendell Phillips called him “the great slaver from Illinois.”
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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.
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It’s the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
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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.
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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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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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I’d been arrested many times by then. I’d been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
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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







