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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
Knew
Harbor
Rights
Harbors
Away
Michigan
Right
Existed
Even
Civil
Something
Involved
Never
Started
Would
Went
Picketing

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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.
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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.
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If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
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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.
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Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course they can also be contradictory.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
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Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into a decent, compassionate, lovely person pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.
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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.
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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.
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I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
Bill Ayers