Bill Ayers Quotes - Page 3

I'm wary of government. Part of [the Tea Party] impulse is to dislike and be worried about the rich. I'm that way too. So I don't find them to be as atrocious as most people do, as your liberals do. I'm not a liberal.

There are things about classic liberalism that obviously I'm drawn to and I bet all of you are as well. Those are things like liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights. But the reason that I reject the label is that I grew up cutting my teeth against the liberals.

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.

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.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

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.

Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.

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.

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.

I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.

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.

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.

[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.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders. They should talk to everyone, they should listen to everyone, and at the end of the day they should have a mind of their own.

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, "You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago." That was the limit of my imagination.

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

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.

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.

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

Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President - that was exhilarating.

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.