Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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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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.
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In some ways a mark of good parenting is that you don’t try to make your children into little knockoffs of yourself. None of us went into business. None of us became powerful people like that.
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The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.
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I don’t think saying “I was wrong here, I was wrong there” absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
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I don’t regret setting bombs.
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[Barack] Obama doesn’t disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I’m a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
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Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
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I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn’t do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?
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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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I’m not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he’s doing what he said he would do.
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When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.
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Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
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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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[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.
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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
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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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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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Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.
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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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Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.
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I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
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We’re actually saying, here’s a principle that I’d like to arc toward. That’s a very different role in life. I didn’t expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn’t expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.
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Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.
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Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
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The US is indeed a terrorist nation. …It’s also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
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I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, “Action is eloquence,” and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.
BILL AYERS