Bill Ayers Quotes
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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.
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Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.
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I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.
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Education is the motor-force of revolution.
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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.
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It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.
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Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it.
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My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, "We all hated the war in Vietnam." Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.
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[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.
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We have sex education - I'm for it, I'm not against it. But any curriculum should recognize that it's young people's job to invent it themselves. You're not going to teach them; they're going to reinvent it.
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You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!
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The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you've won a great victory, now the war will end. And I'm certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.
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I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero - I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.
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That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.
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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.
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It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - people camped out at his house, and wondering who's coming to visit, who's going to be the Secretary of State - that all struck me as inane and stupid.
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I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.
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I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism.
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[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.
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If the logic of capitalism is "expand or die," then either it has to die or the world has to die.
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I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
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Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.
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One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don't talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me. They've just memorized that stupid fact sheet. And we thought, gosh do we sound that good? It didn't seem possible. But that was my introduction to politics.
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My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.
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Nixon probably was a nice guy.
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I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.
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One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.
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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.
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Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.
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To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.
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