“This hand is not the color of yours. But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man.”
Standing Bear to a Nebraska court, May 1879. More here. HT Three Quarks
Standing Bear (not Sitting Bull)
and thank you for linking to such a great article.
Bloody hell. Just to explain the comment above, I initially wrote “Sitting Bull” not the name of the guy which is “Standing Bear”. How embarrassing! Anyway I’ve not retained strikethrough above so as not to inject my stupidity too directly into the reader’s experience. My excuse, such as it is, is that I was in the middle of doing something else – talking to someone – when I posted it.