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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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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
Head
Rosa
Impossible
Activism
Happened
Parks
Anyone
Ass
Ever
Inevitable
Every
Thinks
Thinking
Revolution
Like
Nobody
Todd

More quotes by Bill Ayers

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That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa.
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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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
Bill Ayers
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The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.
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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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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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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I know that's a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.
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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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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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
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What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.
Bill Ayers
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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
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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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It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.
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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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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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
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I have an addiction to caffeine.
Bill Ayers
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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