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In some ways a mark of good parenting is that you don't try to make your children into little knockoffs of yourself. None of us went into business. None of us became powerful people like that. All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.

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
Little
Teacher
Filmmaker
Children
Went
Brothers
Trying
Ways
Sister
Way
Passion
Interests
Make
Powerful
Mark
Librarian
Good
Interest
None
Pursued
Like
Business
Became
Parenting
People
Littles
Brother
Passions

More quotes by Bill Ayers

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I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
Bill Ayers
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That's where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.
Bill Ayers
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Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.
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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You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it - twenty years from now, they'll be marching off into other things and that's still the legacy you leave.
Bill Ayers
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
Bill Ayers
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I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.
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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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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Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
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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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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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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I find some unity with Ron Paul.
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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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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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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Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
Bill Ayers
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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.
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