When you go into a college of education you’ve got aspirations of making a difference in people’s lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education.
BILL AYERSI haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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It’s not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it’s the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.
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[Students for a Democratic Society] was on many campuses and it was a powerful organization. It was founded by Tom Hayden, who passed away very recently.
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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
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Martin 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.
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If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.
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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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The day before every revolution that’s ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.
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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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If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
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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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But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.
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Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we’re talking about.
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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.
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The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.
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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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