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It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.

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
Politics
Family
Apolitical
War
Agenda
Agendas
Height
Cold
Grew
Wasn

More quotes by Bill Ayers

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Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
Bill Ayers
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
Bill Ayers
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[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
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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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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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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I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
Bill Ayers
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I find some unity with Ron Paul.
Bill Ayers
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I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.
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
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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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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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The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
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 was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.
Bill Ayers
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I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.
Bill Ayers
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I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
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 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