I 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.
BILL AYERSIt 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,
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.
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I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
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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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It’s the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
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Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.
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The US is indeed a terrorist nation. …It’s also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
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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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I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class.
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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
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I get up every morning and think…today I’m going to end capitalism.
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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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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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We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
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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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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.
BILL AYERS