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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

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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
Course
Anything
Writing
Things
Sails
World
Narcissism
Sail
Complicated
Courses

More quotes by Bill Ayers

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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
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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
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It 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.
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 more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
Bill Ayers
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In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn't can you do everything the question is, can you do anything?
Bill Ayers
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I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
Bill Ayers
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We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.
Bill Ayers
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Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.
Bill Ayers
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[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them - if McCain had been elected we'd still be where we are on gay rights.
Bill Ayers
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I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill Ayers
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I find some unity with Ron Paul.
Bill Ayers
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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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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
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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
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Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
Bill Ayers
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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
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I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Bill Ayers
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Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
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