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

Categorized in : Social Hard Social Change

We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.

guy roots mean

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

thread figures trying

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

conservative world moving

You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] wa... by Bill Ayers

You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!

disappointed barack said

The Right said, [Barack Obama] is lying, he's a socialist who pals around with terrorists, he's a secret Muslim and blah blah blah. That was their line. The liberals all said, He's winking at me, I can feel him winking in my direction. He wasn't winking. He said exactly who he was and he's lived that out perfectly.

pals secret lying

[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

campaigns compromise politician

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.

smart attitude thinking

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.

congratulations kings war

I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class.

michigan too-much class

What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderat... by Bill Ayers

What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.

mainstream moderates my-family

My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat. by Bill Ayers

My dad was a [Theodor] Roosevelt Democrat.

my-dad democrat dad

When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama. So that's kind of amazing. But he was offered a cabinet post by Eisenhower in his second term. So he was moderate Republican. But if you asked him, he would've said, "I don't have any politics. I'm a business person." Mainstream, the American view, as he understood it.

dad mom views

I more or less shared the view that life should be lived. by Bill Ayers

I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.

should views

I was a kid and I studied when I had to [live]. by Bill Ayers

I was a kid and I studied when I had to [live].

kids

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan.

michigan father years

One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society. They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.

agency children thinking

Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So... by Bill Ayers

Certainly my parents were Dr. [Benjamin] Spock-driven parents. So they were tolerant.

driven drs parent

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position. by Bill Ayers

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

minorities hate war

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.

hate war father

Fairly apolitical. Kind of aspiring to participate in life. I'm 18-19 years old. Wanting to dive into the world and finding the world opening for me in ways that were unimaginable. I didn't sleep for the whole first year at university because it was too much going on. Too many films to see, too many concerts to go to.

sleep world years