Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar: Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy: Hide it in smiles and affability.”

— David Grann

2. “Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”

— David Grann

3. “History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.”

— David Grann

4. “In the old days, an Osage clan, which included a group known as the Travelers in the Mist, would take the lead whenever the tribe was undergoing sudden changes or venturing into unfamiliar realms.”

— David Grann

5. “Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.”

— David Grann

6. “Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success.”

— David Grann

7. “London was the pulsing heart of an island empire built on the toll of seamen and slavery and colonialism.”

— David Grann

8. “Your money draws them and you’re absolutely helpless. They have all the law and all the machinery on their side. Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they’re scalping our souls out here.”

— David Grann

9. “Many Osage, unlike other wealthy Americans, could not spend their money as they pleased because of the federally imposed system of financial guardians.”

— David Grann

10. “What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”

— David Grann

11. “The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered.”

— David Grann

12. “An Indian Affairs agent said, ‘The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

— David Grann

13. “A growing number of white Americans expressed alarm over the Osage’s wealth – outrage that was stoked by the press.”

— David Grann

14. “But in 1921, just as the government had once adopted a ration system to pay the Osage for seized land – just as it always seemed to turn its gospel of enlightenment into a hammer of coercion – Congress implemented even more draconian legislation controlling how the Osage could spend their money.”

— David Grann

15. “In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.”

— David Grann

16. “As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

— David Grann

17. “Stores gone, post office gone, train gone, school gone, oil gone, boys and girls gone – only thing not gone is graveyard and it git bigger.”

— David Grann

18. “Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success. Bulkeley knew that none of them would survive much longer without additional sources of food.”

— David Grann

19. “For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.”

— David Grann

20. “Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world.”

— David Grann

21. “Some day this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father,” a chief of the Osage said in 1928. “There’ll be no fine motorcars and new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.”

— David Grann

22. “At forty-four, Mollie could finally spend her money as she pleased, and was recognized as a full-fledged American citizen.”

— David Grann

23. “Though it took enormous courage and virtue to risk your life in order to protect society, such selflessness also contained, at least from the vantage point of your loved ones, a hint of cruelty.”

— David Grann

24. “As she spoke, I realized that the Reign of Terror had ravaged – still ravaged – generations. A great-grandson of Henry Roan’s once spoke of the legacy of the murders: “I think somewhere it is in the back of our minds. We may not realize it, but it is there, especially if it was a family member that was killed. You just have it in the back of your head that you don’t trust anybody.”

— David Grann

25. “While most of my articles seem unrelated, they typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things – things that most of us would never dare – who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.”

— David Grann

26. “The historian Burns once wrote, “To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”

— David Grann

27. “For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression. Instead, citizens responded to a hue and cry by chasing after suspects.”

— David Grann

28. “White gave his men advice in case their cover was blown: “Keep your balance, avoid any rough stuff if possible.” Making it clear that they should carry weapons, he added, “But if you have to fight to survive, do a good job.”

— David Grann

29. “In 1870, the Osage – expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered – agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

— David Grann

30. “As an Osage mourning prayer went, Have pity on me, O Great Spirit! You see I cry forever, Dry my eyes and give me comfort.”

— David Grann

31. “They marched like madmen from place to place, until overcome by exhaustion and lack of strength they could no longer move from one side to the other, and they remained there, wherever this sad siren voice had summoned them, self-important, and dead.”

— David Grann

32. “A growing number of white Americans expressed alarm over the Osage’s wealth –.”

— David Grann

33. “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”

— David Grann

34. “Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.”

— David Grann

35. “Inquests were a remnant of a time when ordinary citizens largely assumed the burden of investigating crimes and maintaining order. For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.”

— David Grann

36. “The official death toll of the Osage Reign of Terror had climbed to at least twenty-four members of the tribe.”

— David Grann

37. “Fawcett, who had always found refuge in the natural world, no longer recognized the wilderness of bombed-out villages, denuded trees, craters, and sunbaked skeletons. As Lyne wrote in his diary, “Dante would never have condemned lost souls to wander in so terrible a purgatory.”

— David Grann

38. “The course of human events is not permanently altered by the great deeds of history, nor by the great men but by the small daily doings of the little men.”

— David Grann

39. “Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives – who tended to be middle-class white Protestants – held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures.”

— David Grann

40. “He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous because they are held in leash.”

— David Grann

41. “Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.”

— David Grann

42. “Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots – after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state – did police departments emerge in the United States.”

— David Grann

43. “Fawcett once described fear as the ‘motive power of all evil’ which had ’excluded humanity from the Garden of Eden.”

— David Grann

44. “Nevertheless, the case against all of the men of the Wager seemed overwhelming. They were not accused of negligible misconduct but, rather, of a complete breakdown of naval order, from the highest levels of command to the rank and file.”

— David Grann

45. “I am getting older and am, I daresay, impatient of lost years and months,” Fawcett complained to Keltie in early 1918. Later.”

— David Grann

46. “The rise of science in the nineteenth century had had a paradoxical effect: while it undermined faith in Christianity and the literal word of the Bible, it also created an enormous void for someone to explain the mysteries of the universe that lay beyond microbes and evolution and capitalist greed.”

— David Grann

47. “Mollie had become a traveler in the mist.”

— David Grann

48. “Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’ The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find.”

— David Grann

49. “A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder – or merely cruelty to animals.”

— David Grann

50. “This funnel, known as the Drake Passage, makes the torrent even more pulverizing.”

— David Grann