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If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

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
Persons
Tradition
Person
Parents
Everything
Parent
Would
Law
Church
Common
Pastor
White
Slavery
Sense
Bible

More quotes by 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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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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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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After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago. That was the limit of my imagination.
Bill Ayers
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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
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I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
Bill Ayers
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I don't regret setting bombs.
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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I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
Bill Ayers
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The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.
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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Nixon probably was a nice guy.
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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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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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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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
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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
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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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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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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