I don’t think saying “I was wrong here, I was wrong there” absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
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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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.”
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Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer–a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
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I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.
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Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.
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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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“I didn’t want her to miss tonight! I wanted to be able to tell her!” And to see all these people, a Hispanic cop dancing with an old white woman, wow! I mean, that’s the world I want to live in, and because it’s the world I want to live in, I had a hard time leaving.
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Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren’t bound by those rules. We’re not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?
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I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.
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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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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.
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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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Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
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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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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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I didn’t kill innocent people.
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