Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
BILL AYERSMartin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don’t know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life – you might want to – when I read these to my students, they think it’s Malcom X because it’s so radical.
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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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[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 question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.
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Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
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It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn’t elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months.
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
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I wasn’t part of John Kennedy’s vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson’s. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
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The end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that.
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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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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 didn’t kill innocent people.
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This 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.
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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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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