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 AYERSI think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.
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People camped out at his house, and wondering who’s coming to visit, who’s going to be the Secretary of State – that all struck me as inane and stupid.
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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.
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Without a doubt. It’s woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.
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I would say for the young: Don’t be straight jacketed by ideology. Don’t be driven by a structure of ideas.
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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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I’d been arrested many times by then. I’d been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
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The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
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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.
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Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
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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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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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Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.
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The passions and commitments that ignited my activity as a student are the same passions and commitments that I have today.
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I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
BILL AYERS