I’m different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I’m thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They’re not different.
BILL AYERSOne-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don’t talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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I was involved in the anti-war movement.
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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.
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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.
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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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There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were – “a real threat,” you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.
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[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently.
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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.
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I don’t know that I ever bought into the “American dream.” I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the ’50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.
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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?
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I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.
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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.
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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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In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn’t can you do everything; the question is, can you do anything?
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[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.
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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