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Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.

Bill Ayers

I’m wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I’m that way too. So I don’t find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I’m not a liberal.
BILL AYERS

Government Party People
Being an activist and an artist – those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
BILL AYERS

Artist Together Two
I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.
BILL AYERS

Lectures Silent Writing
Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
BILL AYERS

Challenges Class Country
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

All Filmmakers Librarian One Teachers
Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why’d they hate him? Because he said things like “I believe in white supremacy.”
BILL AYERS

Believe Hate White
Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
BILL AYERS

Bird Century Country
It’s not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it’s the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.
BILL AYERS

Black Movement
I wasn’t part of John Kennedy’s vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson’s. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
BILL AYERS

Monsters Vision World
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.
BILL AYERS

Government Proposal Years
The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.
BILL AYERS

Movement Vietnam War
We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.
BILL AYERS

Eye Fronts Should
You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.
BILL AYERS

Change Kids Mind Rising Years
I spoke at the University of Georgia, and a whole contingent of Tea Party people in Hell’s Angels regalia came in and sat in the front and scowled at me while I gave my talk.
BILL AYERS

Angel Government Party
It 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,
BILL AYERS

Baby Mean Son Wheelchair Wheeled
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
BILL AYERS

Activism Art Contradictory

Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.

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Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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