I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.
BILL AYERSI 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.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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I find some unity with Ron Paul.
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
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Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
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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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It’s the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
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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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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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[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.
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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 dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
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Can we imagine a different world? I can. That’s a world where work is rational, it’s in the common good, and we’re actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.
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I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
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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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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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[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he’s saying, I’m not for gay marriage because I’m a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know,
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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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The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.
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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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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
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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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In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying “I’m sorry,” is that there’s so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
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Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
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Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
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After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.
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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.
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I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.
BILL AYERS