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Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.

Bill Ayers

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.
BILL AYERS

Guy Mean Roots
There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the ’50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.
BILL AYERS

Ideas Political Privilege
My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer’s, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen,
BILL AYERS

Father Hate Listen War
But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
BILL AYERS

Boys Fool Mind
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?
BILL AYERS

Guy People Real
I find some unity with Ron Paul.
BILL AYERS

Find Some Unity
To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.
BILL AYERS

Expanding Eye Knowing Universe
I’m writing this book right now called Pallin’ Around, and the subtitle is: “Talking to the Tea Party.” And frankly I find talking to the Tea Party exhilarating, I love it.
BILL AYERS

Exhilarating Frankly Love Talking Writing
Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
BILL AYERS

Artist Together Two
I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
BILL AYERS

Less Shared Should Views
When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
BILL AYERS

Adjustment Gone Identity Life
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.
BILL AYERS

Absolves Heaven Thinking
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
BILL AYERS

Finals Path War
The idea that teaching is somehow the delivery of the goods is such a misunderstanding of what actually goes on.
BILL AYERS

Goes Ideas Teaching
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

Example Illinois Speech
To be a human being is to suffer. But it’s the unnecessary suffering, it’s the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
BILL AYERS

Should Suffering Unnecessary
So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan’s home.
BILL AYERS

Home President
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.
BILL AYERS

Lenses Moments Real
So that’s kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would’ve said, “I don’t have any politics. I’m a business person.” Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.
BILL AYERS

Country Eisenhower Moderate Republican
We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
BILL AYERS

Eye Fronts Should
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

Fun Real Teaching
The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.
BILL AYERS

Movement Vietnam War
[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them – if McCain had been elected we’d still be where we are on gay rights.
BILL AYERS

Gay Rights Winking
What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.
BILL AYERS

Community Needs Teaching
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.
BILL AYERS

Brother Children Teacher
Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President – that was exhilarating.
BILL AYERS

Country Exhilarating Long
Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
BILL AYERS

Figures Thread Trying

Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.

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Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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