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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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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
Real
Lens
Lenses
Buddy
Threat
Regard
Edgar
Moment
Hoover
Moments
Buddies
Thought
Distorted

More quotes by Bill Ayers

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I'm different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I'm thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They're not different.
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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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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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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One of the great crimes of the Bloomberg/Klein administration [in New York City] is that they've removed themselves from communities, as if communities have nothing to say about what their needs and aspirations are for themselves and for their children.
Bill Ayers
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I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected.
Bill Ayers
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You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!
Bill Ayers
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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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I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.
Bill Ayers
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We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.
Bill Ayers
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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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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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Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
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 was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
Bill Ayers
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I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
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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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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If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
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