We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can’t the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It’s a captured system.
BILL AYERSIt felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn’t make mockery of my values. That’s what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.
More Bill Ayers Quotes
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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.
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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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There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were – “a real threat,” you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.
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I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
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Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
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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 proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base – those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.
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I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
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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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It’s the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn’t on the agenda.
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The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
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It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn’t elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months.
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I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.
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“We all hated the war in Vietnam.” Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
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When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.
BILL AYERS