Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why’d they hate him? Because he said things like “I believe in white supremacy.”
BILL AYERSIf you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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This man is a war criminal.” My younger brother and I, he was freshman and I was a sophomore, got caught up in the debates that were swirling around the center of campus and the young Trotskyists had put out a fact sheet on Vietnam that was phenomenal.
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Where’s the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows.
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The idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on.
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Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
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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 buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I’m an intergenerational person.
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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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Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
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It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It’s kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.
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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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Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President – that was exhilarating.
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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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One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.
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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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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?
BILL AYERS