I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, "Action is eloquence," and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail. Bill Ayers More Quotes by Bill Ayers More Quotes From Bill Ayers If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything. Bill Ayers common-sense law white Education is the motor-force of revolution. Bill Ayers motor force revolution I find some unity with Ron Paul. Bill Ayers unity It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you. Bill Ayers paranoid mind I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election. Bill Ayers military law country I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters. Bill Ayers vision monsters world It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools. Bill Ayers greatness community school Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence. Bill Ayers destiny war father 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. Bill Ayers social-change hard social I'm anti-establishment. So all the labels, the reason that I keep joking and rejecting this idea that I'm liberal, well partly that's because I think of myself as a radical, and by that I mean, not even in the terms of Left-Right that you might imagine - but someone who wants to go to the root of problems. Bill Ayers mean ideas thinking The end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that. Bill Ayers regret sorry people One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don't have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that's the way to the future. I'm writing this book right now called Pallin' Around, and the subtitle is: "Talking to the Tea Party." And frankly I find talking to the Tea Party exhilarating, I love it. Bill Ayers party writing book 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 eye humble mean Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue. Bill Ayers real teaching fun I'm different in the sense that every minute of every day, I change. I'm thinking. But the basic principles that have powered me forward are still there. They're not different. Bill Ayers different principles thinking 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 eye humble mean 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 hippie running war But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip. Bill Ayers fool mind boys The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person. Bill Ayers growing-up character school 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 real rights spring
