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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

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Bill Ayers
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: December 26
Autobiographer
Journalist
Peace Activist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Glen Ellyn
Illinois
William Charles Bill Ayers
William Charles Ayers
Steps
Landed
President
Spontaneously
Around
Harbor
Home
Ecstatic
Harbors
Campus
Michigan
University
Swirled

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
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Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
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Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
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[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.
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?
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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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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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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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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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I don't know why there's not more activism today. I do think that your generation is twenty times smarter than our generation ever was, but the problem with being smart like you guys is that it can lead you really easily to being cynical, and cynicism is actually a pacifying attitude.
Bill Ayers
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Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Bill Ayers
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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.
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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In a world as out of balance as this world, everyone can find something to do. And the question isn't can you do everything the question is, can you do anything?
Bill Ayers
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Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.
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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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