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I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.
Bill Ayers
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Bill Ayers
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 26
Autobiographer
Journalist
Peace Activist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Glen Ellyn
Illinois
William Charles Bill Ayers
William Charles Ayers
Principled
Unifying
Wiser
Effective
Wish
More quotes by Bill Ayers
We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.
Bill Ayers
I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
Bill Ayers
Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.
Bill Ayers
So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.
Bill Ayers
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course they can also be contradictory.
Bill Ayers
Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.
Bill Ayers
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
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 Ayers
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 Ayers
It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.
Bill Ayers
Without a doubt. It's woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.
Bill Ayers
One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.
Bill Ayers
I don't regret setting bombs.
Bill Ayers
It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
Bill Ayers
I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.
Bill Ayers
I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
Bill Ayers
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
Bill Ayers
Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
Bill Ayers
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill Ayers
I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.
Bill Ayers
