Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.
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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I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that’s always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
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[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he’s saying, I’m not for gay marriage because I’m a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know,
BILL AYERS -
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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That’s in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn’t work, but it’s very hard to predict what will work.
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The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.
BILL AYERS -
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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One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don’t talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me.
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I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
BILL AYERS -
Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.
BILL AYERS -
Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
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That’s where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.
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All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.
BILL AYERS -
What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
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After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.
BILL AYERS -
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.
BILL AYERS