I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
BILL AYERSThis 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
-
-
I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
BILL AYERS -
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 -
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.
BILL AYERS -
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
BILL AYERS -
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.
BILL AYERS -
What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
BILL AYERS -
When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war.
BILL AYERS -
I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
BILL AYERS -
Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.
BILL AYERS -
The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
BILL AYERS -
The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.
BILL AYERS -
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.
BILL AYERS -
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.”
BILL AYERS -
They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.
BILL AYERS -
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.
BILL AYERS