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Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue.

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
Fun
Engaging
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Parenting
Real
Dialogue
Writing
Exciting
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Build
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Teaching
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More quotes by Bill Ayers

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I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the 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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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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There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - a real threat, you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.
Bill Ayers
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Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, How shall we respond to the dreams of youth? It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer--a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
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 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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When I was arrested opposing the war in Vietnam in 1965, as I said about 20 or 30% of people were opposed to the war. By 1968, more than half of Americans were opposed to the war. If you pull in Europeans, Canadians, people from around the Third World, the war was vastly unpopular. But even half of Americans by 1968 opposed the war.
Bill Ayers
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I'm different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I'm thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They're not different.
Bill Ayers
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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
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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
Bill Ayers
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I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
Bill Ayers
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I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Bill Ayers
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Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
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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The nice thing about being detained in Canada is it's like being in a Days Inn it's very clean and very nice.
Bill Ayers
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I mean the prime case that you can look at is Martin Luther King, who was only an activist for 13 years. But every year, he became deeper, more concerned, connecting more issues.
Bill Ayers
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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
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I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.
Bill Ayers
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Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
Bill Ayers