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I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.

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
Would
Went
Picketing
Knew
Harbor
Rights
Harbors
Away
Michigan
Right
Existed
Even
Civil
Something
Involved
Never
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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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My brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.
Bill Ayers
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It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.
Bill Ayers
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I'm wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I'm that way too. So I don't find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I'm not a liberal.
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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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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All that means to me is that people who have a vision of a better world have a responsibility to open their eyes, to pay attention, to act on what the moment demands, and to be humble about that action.
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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I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill Ayers
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There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.
Bill Ayers
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There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.
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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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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Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course they can also be contradictory.
Bill Ayers
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We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can't the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It's a captured system.
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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I've said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.
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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If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
Bill Ayers
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I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Bill Ayers