Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2026 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. “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

3. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

6. “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

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

— David Grann

8. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

12. “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

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

— David Grann

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

20. “In the Choctaw language, “Oklahoma” means “red people.”

— David Grann

21. “All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act. – Don DeLillo, Libra.”

— David Grann

22. “Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t – the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

25. “Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders.”

— David Grann

26. “You have got the wrong pig by the tail.”

— David Grann

27. “Many accidents happen to white people because they don’t believe their dreams.”

— David Grann

28. “It begins as barely a rivulet, this, the mightiest river in the world, mightier than the Nile and the Ganges, mightier than the Mississippi and all the rivers in China.”

— David Grann

29. “God forbid he should say he was on a ship rather than in one.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

31. “The forests and rivers supply all the calls of nature in plenty.”

— David Grann

32. “In his journal, Millechamp described the island as the most horrid thing he had ever seen – “a proper nursery for desperation.”

— David Grann

33. “The more White investigated the flow of oil money from Osage headrights, the more he found layer upon layer of corruption.”

— David Grann

34. “They required both if Bulkeley was ever to find a way back to his wife and five children.”

— David Grann

35. “A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740–1744 by George Anson. At.”

— David Grann

36. “Men-of-war were among the most sophisticated machines yet conceived:.”

— David Grann

37. “As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What.”

— David Grann

38. “The Boy Scouts, whose first troop in the United States was organized in Pawhuska, in 1909, joined the search for Vaughan.”

— David Grann

39. “By 1877, there were virtually no more.”

— David Grann

40. “Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.”

— David Grann

41. “The watchful Detective will seize the Criminal in his weakest moments and force from him, by his sympathy and the confidence which the Criminal has in him, the secret which devours him.”

— David Grann

42. “A diplomat later quipped that Anson was so unknowing about the world that he’d been “round it, but never in it.”

— David Grann

43. “How many ships, with precious lives and cargo, had wrecked because mariners hadn’t known precisely where they were?”

— David Grann

44. “The room was dark. Nina Fawcett sat on one side of a table; on the other was a woman peering into a crystal ball. Nina, after years of searching for her husband and son in this world, had begun to look in another dimension.”

— David Grann

45. “A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control.”

— David Grann

46. “Hoover, who was so sensitive about his modest stature that he rarely promoted taller agents.”

— David Grann

47. “Cheap instructed them to immediately deploy the four vessels that were strapped on the deck:.”

— David Grann

48. “Because the Amazon frontier was so isolated, it was governed by its own laws and, as one observer put it, made the American West seem by comparison “as proper as a prayer meeting.”

— David Grann

49. “Altogether, nearly 300 of the Centurion’s some 500 men were eventually listed as “DD” – Discharged Dead.”

— David Grann

50. “Although the Osage still went on buffalo hunts, they were chasing not only food but the past.”

— David Grann