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It felt to me like I was living my life in a way that didn't make mockery of my values. That's what I intended to do. So, that became a very radicalizing proposition for me.

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
Didn
Mockery
Way
Proposition
Make
Propositions
Life
Intended
Like
Became
Values
Living
Felt

More quotes by 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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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?
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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[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.
Bill Ayers
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Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
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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I have an addiction to caffeine.
Bill Ayers
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I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
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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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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Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn't end the war. And that's what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That's our shame.
Bill Ayers
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This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
Bill Ayers
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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
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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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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In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying I'm sorry, is that there's so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
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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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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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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Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
Bill Ayers