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If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

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
Hand
Chilling
Literature
Dogmatic
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Chill
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Every
Communism
Soviet
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More quotes by Bill Ayers

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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
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I was arrested 1965. I had come back from the merchant marines, got into conversations about the war. I had never heard of Vietnam until I was in the merchant marines in constitution square in Athens, and I picked up the New York Herald or the International Herald Tribune and there was my first introduction of the word Vietnam.
Bill Ayers
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Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into a decent, compassionate, lovely person pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.
Bill Ayers
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I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.
Bill Ayers
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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.
Bill Ayers
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I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.
Bill Ayers
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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
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Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
Bill Ayers
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I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Bill Ayers
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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
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The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.
Bill Ayers
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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.
Bill Ayers
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In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying I'm sorry, is that there's so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
Bill Ayers
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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.
Bill Ayers
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Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.
Bill Ayers
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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.
Bill Ayers
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I find some unity with Ron Paul.
Bill Ayers
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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
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One of the great crimes of the Bloomberg/Klein administration [in New York City] is that they've removed themselves from communities, as if communities have nothing to say about what their needs and aspirations are for themselves and for their children.
Bill Ayers
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You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!
Bill Ayers