Bill Ayers Quotes - Page 5

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

When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere.

Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.

I see [Lyndon] Johnson as the war in Vietnam, and the invasion of the Dominican Republic and so on. So I'm not a liberal in that sense, because i think of liberals as part of that establishment.

If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.

Now in my view, if you were to line up the Presidents in the order of who made the greatest accomplishments, you'd put Lyndon Johnson in that arena with both Roosevelts probably, and [Abraham] Lincoln and so on. But the idea that Lyndon Johnson was operating as a free agent and coming up with these ideas on his own is nonsense.

[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.

My brother and I met several times during that weekend trying to figure out what we were each going to do, and we met for breakfast the morning of the sit-in and I had decided that I was going to go get arrested, and he decided that he was going to have the harder job and go tell our parents that I'd been arrested.

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

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.

It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.

What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.

Living in a bubble as I said in a featherbed of privilege. That's why leaving home, leaving the prep school and going to the University of Michigan in the early '60s was a moment of awakening and to go to a place like Michigan and to see suddenly a world in flames and the injustices all around was quite a wake up call. I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.

I dropped out in '64. And I came back to Michigan, in '65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.

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.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

Without a doubt. It's woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.

I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.

There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the '50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

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].

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.

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.

I was arrested 1965. I had come back from the merchant marines, got into conversations about the war. I had never heard of Vietnam until I was in the merchant marines in constitution square in Athens, and I picked up the New York Herald or the International Herald Tribune and there was my first introduction of the word Vietnam.

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.