The Animal People (2019)

Steven Best: Self (professor of philosophy)

Quotes 

• Self (professor of philosophy) : Social change always happens through a wide variety of forces. It's always pluristic. And people wanna revise history. They wanna say, "Well, Gandhi won the Indian independence movement." Well, I'm sorry, Gandhi didn't win it alone. There were forces that were violently attacking the British, and that helped pressure the British to leave India. Dr. Martin Luther King did not win the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by himself. Standing behind him was Malcolm X. It wasn't hippies that stopped the Vietnam War. It was the Vietnamese peasantry that kicked the American army's ass. Violence and sabotage and property destruction, threats of violence and coercive change of various kinds is what moves history.

  Self (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) : We have this really rosy picture of our history. You know, when we talk about women's suffrage, we don't talk about arson. We don't talk about random property destruction.

  Self (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) : America was founded on agitation, throwing crates of tea into the Boston Harbor because they were gonna protest the tea tax. That was economic sabotage. That was direct action. That's not terrorism. That's American.