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].
BILL AYERSI do think [Barack Obama’s] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He’s counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
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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 was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.
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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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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.
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It’s the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
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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’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.
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The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.
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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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In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders.
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It wasn’t [Barack] Obama per se; it was the feeling on the ground; it was seeing an old black woman in a wheelchair being wheeled by her son waving a big American flag, and then seeing a guy with his baby in his arms saying,
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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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Education is a right, it’s a journey, it’s a process, and it’s something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.
BILL AYERS -
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