Top 50 Dave Cullen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You can’t really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.”

— Dave Cullen

2. “Columbine also changed police response to attacks. No more perimeters. A national task force was organized to develop a new plan. In 2003, it released “The Active Shooter Protocol.” The gist was simple: If the shooter seems active, storm the building. Move toward the sound of gunfire. Disregard even victims. There is one objective: Neutralize the shooters. Stop them or kill them.”

— Dave Cullen

3. “This Front Range towering over Columbine is taller than the highest peaks in all of Appalachia. Roads and regular habitation stop suddenly at the base of the foothills; even vegetation struggles to survive. Just three miles away, and it feels like the end of the world.”

— Dave Cullen

4. “The final portrait is often furthest from the truth.”

— Dave Cullen

5. “Eric dreamed big but settled for reality.”

— Dave Cullen

6. “Dylan Bennet Klebold was born brilliant. He started school a year early, and by third grade was enrolled in the CHIPS program: Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students. Even among the brains, Dylan stood out as a math prodigy. The early start didn’t impede him intellectually, but strained his shyness further.”

— Dave Cullen

7. “The Columbine crisis was never a hostage standoff. Eric and Dylan had no intentions of making demands. SWAT teams searched the building for over three hours, but the killers were lying dead the entire time. They had committed suicide in the library at 12:08, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack. The killing and the terror had been real. The standoff had not.”

— Dave Cullen

8. “When he was eleven, id Software released the video game Doom, and Eric found the perfect virtual playground to explore his fantasies. His adversaries had faces, bodies, and identities now. They made sounds and fought back. Eric could measure his skills and keep score. He could beat nearly everyone he knew. On the Internet, he could triumph over thousands of strangers he had never met. He almost always won, until later, when he met Dylan. They were an even match.”

— Dave Cullen

9. “I don’t want anyone else to understand it, because you only understand it when you have been welcomed into a club only the saddest people can enter. The cost of admission is the death of your loved one at the hands of someone else.”

— Dave Cullen

10. “The problem, as Eric saw it, was natural selection. He had alluded to the concept on his Web site; here he explained – relentlessly. Natural selection had failed. Man had intervened. Medicines, vaccines, and special ed programs had conspired to keep the rejects in the human herd. So Eric was surrounded by inferiors – who would not shut their freaking mouths! How could he tolerate all the miserable chatter?”

— Dave Cullen

11. “Dr. Fuselier had the opposite reaction. Insanity was marked by mental confusion. Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation. Fuselier ticked off Eric’s personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy. It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.”

— Dave Cullen

12. “Healing begins, the Denver Post announced Thursday morning. The headline spanned the full width of page one thirty-six hours after the attack. Ministers, psychiatrists, and grief counselors cringed. It was an insanely premature assessment.”

— Dave Cullen

13. “I’m often asked what made me spend a decade on Columbine. It was that day and those kids. I didn’t see it as a book then, but I knew I’d be with these kids a long time. Eventually, two questions drove me. The second was why. Why drove me nuts. But the question that started and sustained me was what would became of those two thousand kids.”

— Dave Cullen

14. “Jeffco had a problem. Before Eric and Dylan shot themselves, officers had discovered files on the boys. The cops had twelve pages from Eric’s Web site, spewing hate and threatening to kill. For detectives, a written confession, discovered before the killers were captured, was a big break. It certainly simplified the search warrant. But for commanders, a public confession, which they had sat on since 1997 – that could be a PR disaster.”

— Dave Cullen

15. “Why no pictures?” While I knew from the beginning that I did not want to include them, it took lengthy discussion with readers to articulate exactly why. It comes down to the fact that photos capture one instant in a person’s life. I hoped to bring these people alive as complex individuals: hopeful, gloomy, anxious, playful, devious, etc. Photos, within these covers, undermine that, in my opinion. So we left them out. Photos.”

— Dave Cullen

16. “Human nature was smothered by society; healthy instincts were smothered by laws. They were training us to be assembly-line robots; that’s why they lined the school desks up in rows and trained kids to respond to opening and closing bells. The monotonous human assembly line squelched the life out of individual experience.”

— Dave Cullen

17. “And we have obviously failed on guns. Victims have engaged the public, and polls consistently indicate that huge majorities, including gun owners, support commonsense steps. Dr. Ochberg is frustrated, too. “Good people have tried to do good things but no policy has been enacted to reduce access of military weapons to kids,” he said. “No leader has had the guts to take on the NRA.” Nor has its own membership.”

— Dave Cullen

18. “Most of the Columbine parents were affluent enough to endow their kids with cars. Eric had a black Honda Prelude. Dylan drove a vintage BMW his dad had refurbished. The two cars sat side by side in their assigned spaces in the senior lot every day. At lunch the boys loaded into one with a handful of friends to grab a bite and a smoke.”

— Dave Cullen

19. “The real slog, if they wanted to get serious, was to convince hunters, collectors, and enthusiasts that no one was coming for their guns.”

— Dave Cullen

20. “Robyn looked over to her friends’ spaces. Eric, Dylan, and Zack had assigned spots, three in a row. Zack’s car was there. Eric’s and Dylan’s were missing.”

— Dave Cullen

21. “Stone made the first of an infamous string of accusations. “What are these parents doing that are letting their kids have automatic weapons?” he asked.”

— Dave Cullen

22. “Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their eyes and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why – fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The “end of days” fantasy was even more infuriating.”

— Dave Cullen

23. “What good were special talents when there was no one to share them with?”

— Dave Cullen

24. “One thoughtful Evangelical pastor said he approved of using the massacre for recruitment, as long as it was truly done for God. He bristled at “spiritual headhunters, just racking up another scalp. The Bible was never meant to be a club,” he said. “If I’m using it as a weapon, that’s really sad.”

— Dave Cullen

25. “Eric turned slowly and gazed over his shoulder with his trademark detachment. He studied the guy and turned back with less interest than he had shown toward the phone. “I hate almost everyone,” he replied blankly. “Ah, yes. I wanna rip his head off and eat it.”

— Dave Cullen

26. “The warrants were typed up in Golden, the county seat, delivered to a judge, signed, driven out to the killers’ homes, and exercised within four hours of the first shots – before the SWAT team reached the library and discovered the attack was over.”

— Dave Cullen

27. “On May 25, something unexpected happened. Police opened the school up so families of the library victims could walk through the scene. This served two functions: victims could face the crime scene with their loved ones, and revisiting the room might jar loose memories or clarify confusion. Three senior investigators stood by to answer questions and observe.”

— Dave Cullen

28. “Tom Klebold called 911 to warn them his son might be involved. He also called a lawyer.”

— Dave Cullen

29. “They talked to a lawyer that night. He related a sobering thought. “Dylan isn’t here anymore for people to hate,” he said. “So people are going to hate you.”

— Dave Cullen

30. “The sight that really stunned him was outside, on the sidewalk and the lawn. Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott were still out there. No one had even covered them.”

— Dave Cullen

31. “If we care about ending this, we in the media need to see our role as clearly as the perps have. We did not start this, nor have we pulled any triggers. But the killers have made us reliable partners. We supply the audience, they provide the show.”

— Dave Cullen

32. “Love was the most common word in Dylan’s journal. Eric was filling his Web site with hate.”

— Dave Cullen

33. “Humans were trapped in a box of their own construction: mental prisons caging us from a universe of possibilities.”

— Dave Cullen

34. “And they shared a whole lot of hoots and howls and hearty laughs. What a freaking wild time.”

— Dave Cullen

35. “Good and evil, love and hate – always wrestling, never evolving. Pick your side, it’s up to you – but you better pray it picks you back. Why would love never choose him?”

— Dave Cullen

36. “He came to repeatedly and began again. No one knows how many times. A bloody trail revealed his convoluted path. He started less than two table lengths from the windows, but he headed off in the wrong direction. Then he hit obstacles: bodies, table legs, and chairs. Some he pushed away, others had to be maneuvered around. He kept heading for the light. If he could just make it to the windows maybe someone would see him. If he had to, maybe he would jump. It took three hours to get there.”

— Dave Cullen

37. “Oddballs are not the problem. They do not fit the profile. There is no profile.”

— Dave Cullen

38. “The young pastor rushed to the microphone and proclaimed the power of Jesus. Who was ready to accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior? he cried. No one moved. He was astonished. “Nobody?” he asked.”

— Dave Cullen

39. “Columbine had one of the best academic reputations in the state; 80 percent of graduates headed on to degree programs. College dominated the conversation now: big fat acceptance packets and paper-thin rejection envelopes; last-minute campus visits to narrow down the finalists. It was time to commit to a university, write the deposit check, and start selecting first-semester classes. High school was essentially over.”

— Dave Cullen

40. “Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor – generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record – he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.”

— Dave Cullen

41. “The cops pleaded with the TV stations to stop. Please ask the hostages to quit calling the media, they said. Tell them to turn off the televisions. The stations aired the requests and continued broadcasting the calls. “If you’re watching, kids, turn the TV off,” one anchor implored. “Or down, at least.”

— Dave Cullen

42. “Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like a couple even if you’ve never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks.”

— Dave Cullen

43. “Jesus Jesus Jesus. There was a whole lot of Him that day.”

— Dave Cullen

44. “Most of the student body wandered the park, desperate to unload their stories. They needed adults to hear them, and their parents would not do. They found their audience: the press. Students were wary at first, but let their guards down quickly. Reporters seemed so understanding. Clement Park felt like an enormous confessional Wednesday. The kids would regret it.”

— Dave Cullen

45. “But who was telling whom? The writers assumed kids were informing the media. It was the other way around.”

— Dave Cullen

46. “The narrative unfolding on television looked nothing like the killers’ plan. It looked only moderately like what was actually occurring. It would take months for investigators to piece together what had gone on inside. Motive would take longer to unravel. It would be years before the detective team would explain why. The public couldn’t wait that long. The media was not about to. They speculated.”

— Dave Cullen

47. “So what accounted for all the confusion? “Eyewitness testimony, in general, is not very accurate,” one investigator explained. “Put that together with gunshots going off and just the most terrifying situation in their life, what they remember now may not be anywhere near what really happened.” Human memory can be erratic.”

— Dave Cullen

48. “What do you want to do with your life? That was easy. NBK.”

— Dave Cullen

49. “A woman leapt up. “Where is that other bus!” she demanded. There was no bus. “There was never another bus,” Doreen Tomlin said later. “It was like a false hope they gave you.”

— Dave Cullen

50. “Civilians always believe a good psychopath.”

— Dave Cullen