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My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, We all hated the war in Vietnam. Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.

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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More quotes by Bill Ayers

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I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
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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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.
Bill Ayers
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I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.
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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It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
Bill Ayers
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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
Bill Ayers
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Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
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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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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Now in my view, if you were to line up the Presidents in the order of who made the greatest accomplishments, you'd put Lyndon Johnson in that arena with both Roosevelts probably, and [Abraham] Lincoln and so on. But the idea that Lyndon Johnson was operating as a free agent and coming up with these ideas on his own is nonsense.
Bill Ayers
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The Right said, [Barack Obama] is lying, he's a socialist who pals around with terrorists, he's a secret Muslim and blah blah blah. That was their line. The liberals all said, He's winking at me, I can feel him winking in my direction. He wasn't winking. He said exactly who he was and he's lived that out perfectly.
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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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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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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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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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
Bill Ayers
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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
Bill Ayers
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Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
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