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I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.
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
Confinement
Breathed
Deliverance
Walls
Air
Wall
Books
Book
Leapt
More quotes by Bill Ayers
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course they can also be contradictory.
Bill Ayers
[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
Bill Ayers
I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Bill Ayers
Now in my view, if you were to line up the Presidents in the order of who made the greatest accomplishments, you'd put Lyndon Johnson in that arena with both Roosevelts probably, and [Abraham] Lincoln and so on. But the idea that Lyndon Johnson was operating as a free agent and coming up with these ideas on his own is nonsense.
Bill Ayers
Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. 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.
Bill Ayers
I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill Ayers
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.
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
Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.
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
I know that's a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.
Bill Ayers
That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa.
Bill Ayers
[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
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
I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.
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
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.
Bill Ayers
I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
Bill Ayers
I didn't kill innocent people.
Bill Ayers
It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
Bill Ayers
