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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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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
Leaving
Republican
Wonderful
Palpable
Feeling
Slipped
Sense
Republicans
Feelings
George
Back
Relief
Bush

More quotes by Bill Ayers

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I didn't kill innocent people.
Bill Ayers
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Being an activist and an artist - those two things should go together. You should allow the artistic sensibility to control some of your activism, but never should it be allowed to paralyze you.
Bill Ayers
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It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.
Bill Ayers
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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
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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?
Bill Ayers
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Nixon probably was a nice guy.
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
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If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.
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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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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Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
Bill Ayers
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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
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Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course they can also be contradictory.
Bill Ayers
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I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
Bill Ayers
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I have an addiction to caffeine.
Bill Ayers
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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
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The US is indeed a terrorist nation. ...It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.
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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Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
Bill Ayers
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I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn't agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.
Bill Ayers