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Quotes by Tom Hayden

Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.
– Tom Hayden
But there is something seriously problematic about radicals and progressives in American politics. Some say it's the two-party system that squashes third parties. Some say that it's the potentiality or expanse of the middle class that marginalizes people that want to reform the system itself. Some make a sort of psychological analysis, that the left doesn't want to win, that success means co-optation. All of those things have some merit.
– Tom Hayden
Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in what she said and did in North Vietnam.
– Tom Hayden
I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it was less than 1 percent out of 50,000 votes. I'd put in six or seven years into changing L.A.
– Tom Hayden
I estimate a very conservative number of 25,000 dead homeboys. If 25,000 white people were killed in two decades of urban drive-bys, you could imagine there would be prime time television, there would be counseling, economic packages, truces would be negotiated by diplomats with experience in Northern Ireland or the Balkans.
– Tom Hayden
I put in work for my neighborhood. Hundreds of bills, measures, budget items, and hearings. I always tried to make it a point to stay late, to always run the longest hearings, to carry nearly the most bills. The tragedy was that of the 18 years I was in Sacramento, 16 years were under Republican governors.
– Tom Hayden
I think people are entitled to march without a permit. When you have a few hundred thousand people on the street you have permission.
– Tom Hayden
I was for Gore. I thought that Gore and the Democrats were pretty clueless as to what Nader and the Greens represented, and they acted like bullies.
– Tom Hayden
I wish that I'd been in Congress at some point. Especially now with Bush there. But I would have a really hard time getting elected because of my views. L.A. is very ethnic. Many of the Jewish voters would not support me because of my views on the Middle East.
– Tom Hayden
I'm not ready to give you a clear answer on whether electoral politics holds any particular hope for progressives. It would mean that nothing I did ever mattered.
– Tom Hayden
I've interviewed a lot of veteranos and OGs. Some of them were Vietnam vets - they came back with weapons training, and dishonorable discharges, and drug addictions.
– Tom Hayden
I've written a book on gangs, taught a course on gangs at Occidental.
– Tom Hayden
If I were George W. Bush, I would be terrorized by the eyes of those scruffy-looking veterans, the so-called band of brothers, volunteering for duty with the Kerry campaign. They look like men with scores to settle.
– Tom Hayden
If you look at the data, the inner city that was the riot zone lost 55,000 jobs in the ten years from 1992 to 2002, instead of gaining a surplus of 50,000.
– Tom Hayden
Imagine a nineteenth-century Jane Fonda visiting the Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills before the battle at Little Big Horn. Imagine her examining Crazy Horse's arrows or climbing upon Sitting Bull's horse. Such behavior by a well-known actress no doubt would have infuriated Gen. George Armstrong Custer, but what would the rest of us feel today?
– Tom Hayden
In Miami, there were only a couple thousand protesters in a city that is heavily Republican and includes a lot of right-wing terrorists. It was favorable territory for the police. They had the protesters outnumbered 10-1.
– Tom Hayden
Most centrist Democrats... try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy.
– Tom Hayden
Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad.
– Tom Hayden
Protest politics has been vibrant against Bush and the war in Iraq, but it's been intergenerational. This doesn't seem to be a resurgence of student activism.
– Tom Hayden
Rather than distance ourselves from the past, as the centrist amnesiacs would counsel, perhaps we should finally peel back the scabs and take a closer look at why all the wounds haven't healed.
– Tom Hayden
The hunger strike at UCLA led to hundreds of students actually studying the farm worker experience and Chicanos in the context of Latin America, whereas they would have been on the outside raising fists and banners. So I count that as activism inside the classroom.
– Tom Hayden
The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.
– Tom Hayden
The now legendary Fonda photo shows her with diminutive Vietnamese women examining an antiaircraft weapon, implying in the rightist imagination that she relished the thought of killing those American pilots innocently flying overhead.
– Tom Hayden
The peace and justice movement has to expand and not run away from the plight of gang members.
– Tom Hayden
The politicians of New York have everything that is necessary to make proper decisions and they will have to live with what happens afterwards. The worst scenario is the politicians covering their eyes and turning it over to the FBI.
– Tom Hayden
The Rambo movies not only popularized the spitting image but also the equally incredible claim that hundreds of American soldiers missing in action were being held by the Vietnamese Communists for unspecified purposes.
– Tom Hayden
There has to be an inner peace process that treats gang members like traumatized war victims who lack counseling, jobs, and respect. A lot of that has got to be self-administered in affinity groups, counseling groups, in jail and out of jail, with resources and professional help.
– Tom Hayden
There is no role in a war unless the parties are exhausted. These parties are not exhausted. They are still on a triumphal path. They are not on a coalition path. It's an either/or death struggle. They don't understand that the death is ongoing right now and could take several cycles for the corpse to be autopsied. I hope you use this - this should put your paper on the map. Everybody should read it.
– Tom Hayden
Twice the Republicans in the California legislature tried to block my seating because of my trips to Hanoi.
– Tom Hayden
Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling, but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable?
– Tom Hayden