Melissa Sathe

“who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Genetic evidence, of individuals across the world, alive now, shows that all non-African people are descended from one small group that must have passed through the Arabian peninsula.”
― Peter Watson, The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New

“The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth. Only Iceland’s Althing, founded in 930 A.D., is older.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian