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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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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
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Different
Basic
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Thinking
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More quotes by Bill Ayers

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The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.
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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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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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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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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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
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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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I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
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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Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
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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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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Politicians are conservative by nature.
Bill Ayers
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I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn't do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?
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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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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This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
Bill Ayers
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It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?
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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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