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Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
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
Working
Daunting
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Organizing
Advanced
Capitalist
Challenge
England
Challenges
Class
More quotes by Bill Ayers
I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.
Bill Ayers
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
It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.
Bill Ayers
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
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
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
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
Bill Ayers
Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
Bill Ayers
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
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
Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, How shall we respond to the dreams of youth? It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer--a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
Bill Ayers
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
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
After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago. That was the limit of my imagination.
Bill Ayers
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
I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That's what fascism was going to look like. That's what it did look like.
Bill Ayers
Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.
Bill Ayers
I don't regret setting bombs.
Bill Ayers
I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.
Bill Ayers
I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.
Bill Ayers