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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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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
Made
Brown
People
John
Slavery
Phillips
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Frederick
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Harriet
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More quotes by Bill Ayers
There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.
Bill Ayers
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
Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Bill Ayers
Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
Bill Ayers
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
Your body's always going through changes. It's fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.
Bill Ayers
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
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
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 more or less shared the view that life should be lived.
Bill Ayers
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
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
[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them - if McCain had been elected we'd still be where we are on gay rights.
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
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course they can also be contradictory.
Bill Ayers
Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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
I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.
Bill Ayers
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
Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.
Bill Ayers
