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I do think [Barack Obama's] strategy for re-election is so misguided. He's counting on the Republicans to self-destruct, and they might, you know, but they might not. So he might be a one-term president.
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
Thinking
Obama
Election
Republican
Term
Destruct
President
Misguided
Might
Counting
Self
Republicans
Think
Strategy
More quotes by Bill Ayers
[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
It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.
Bill Ayers
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.
Bill Ayers
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
I mean the prime case that you can look at is Martin Luther King, who was only an activist for 13 years. But every year, he became deeper, more concerned, connecting more issues.
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
What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
Bill Ayers
I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.
Bill Ayers
Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we're talking about.
Bill Ayers
Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Bill Ayers
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
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
All that means to me is that people who have a vision of a better world have a responsibility to open their eyes, to pay attention, to act on what the moment demands, and to be humble about that action.
Bill Ayers
We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can't the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It's a captured system.
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
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
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
Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.
Bill Ayers
Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.
Bill Ayers
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
