Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You have got the wrong pig by the tail.”

— David Grann

52. “In the early twentieth century, George Getty, an attorney from Minneapolis, began his family’s quest for oil in the eastern part of Osage territory, on a parcel of land, Lot 50, that he’d leased for $500. When his son, Jean Paul Getty, was a boy, he visited the area with him.”

— David Grann

53. “Hoover, who believed that his men should conquer their deficiencies the way he had conquered his childhood stutter, purged anyone who failed to meet his exacting standards. “I have caused the removal from the service of a considerable number of employees,” he informed White and other special agents. “Some have been lacking in educational ability and others have been lacking in moral stamina.” Hoover often repeated the maxim “You either improve or deteriorate.”

— David Grann

54. “Stay, traveller, awhile, and view One who has travelled more than you: Quite round the globe, through each degree, Anson and I have ploughed the sea.”

— David Grann

55. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

58. “The men wondered whether Cheap, like Captain Kidd and Commodore Anson, understood that the secret to establishing command was not tyrannizing men but convincing, sympathizing, and inspiring them – or if he would be one of those despots who ruled by the lash.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

60. “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

61. “One twelve-year-old boy pleaded to a close companion for some extra flour, saying that he would otherwise not live to see Brazil, but his shipmate was unmoved. “Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.” The boy’s misery ended only when “heaven sent death to his relief.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

63. “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

64. “Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.”

— David Grann

65. “There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian?”

— David Grann

66. “Wah’Kon-Tah, the mysterious life force that pervades the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars; the force around which the Osage had structured their lives for centuries, hoping to bring some order out of the chaos and confusion on earth; the force that was there but not there – invisible, remote, giving, awesome, unanswering.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

68. “Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.”

— David Grann

69. “Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests – revising, erasing, embroidering – so do nations. After all the grim and troubling narratives about the Wager disaster, and after all the death and destruction, the empire had finally found its mythic tale of the sea.”

— David Grann

70. “Millechamp wrote in his journal, ‘Our seamen now almost all despairing of ever getting on shore voluntarily gave themselves up to their fatal distemper.’ And they envied ’those whose good fortune it was to die first.”

— David Grann

71. “The three women spoke candidly about the family’s history and shared with me a video recording of Ernest that was taken shortly before he died, in which he talked about Mollie and his past.”

— David Grann

72. “Gray Horse, in the western part of the territory, consisted of little more than a cluster of newly built lodges, and it was here where Lizzie and Ne-kah-e-se-y, who married in 1874, settled.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

74. “Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”

— David Grann

75. “One government study estimated that before 1925 guardians had pilfered at least $8 million directly from the restricted accounts of their Osage wards. “The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions – not thousands – but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.”

— David Grann

76. “Asked at one point what he had done after the shooting, he replied, “I went home and ate supper.”

— David Grann

77. “By 1877, there were virtually no more American buffalo to hunt – a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words of an army officer, “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

— David Grann

78. “If J. Edgar Hoover used the Osage murder probe as a showcase for the bureau, a series of sensational crimes in the 1930s stoked public fears and enabled Hoover to turn the organization into the powerful force recognized today.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

80. “We all impose some coherence – some meaning – on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done – or haven’t done.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

82. “One of Hale’s favorite poems echoed Jesus’s command in the Sermon on the Mount: Man’s judgment errs, but there is One who “doeth all things well.” Ever, throughout the voyage of life, this precept keep in view: “Do unto others as thou wouldst that they should do to you.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

84. “Then she repeated what God told Cain after he killed Abel: “The blood cries out from the ground.”

— David Grann

85. “Exploration, however, no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward, to what guidebooks and brochures called “camping and wilderness therapy” and “personal growth through adventure.”

— David Grann

86. “The Osage had been assured by the US government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege form settlers. Among them was the family o f Laura Ingalls Wilder, who later wrote Little house on the Prairie based on her experiences.”

— David Grann

87. “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

88. “In 1894, when Mollie was seven, her parents were informed that they had to enroll her in the St. Louis School, a Catholic boarding institution for girls that had been opened in Pawhuska, which was two days’ journey.”

— David Grann

89. “The average man-of-war was estimated by a leading shipwright to last only fourteen years.”

— David Grann

90. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Inspector Auguste Dupin –.”

— David Grann

91. “A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act. – Don DeLillo, Libra.”

— David Grann

92. “They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions – with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving – and even sacrificing themselves for – a system many of them rarely question.”

— David Grann

93. “Five and a half years. That’s how long the three men had been gone from England.”

— David Grann

94. “Mathews bitterly recalled reporters “enjoying the bizarre impact of wealth on the Neolithic men, with the usual smugness and wisdom of the unlearned.”

— David Grann

95. “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

96. “It was getting so that you could not bury an Osage Indian at a cost of under $6,000” – a sum that, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of nearly $80,000 today. The.”

— David Grann

97. “White and his cowboy hat loomed over the diminutive Hoover, who was so sensitive about his modest stature that he rarely promoted taller agents to headquarters and later installed a raised dais behind his desk to stand on.”

— David Grann

98. “Mollie had reached Pawhuska. Although the reservation’s capital then seemed a small, squalid place – a “muddy little trading post,” as one visitor described it – it was likely the biggest settlement Mollie had ever seen.”

— David Grann

99. “A letter to the editor in the Independent, a weekly magazine, echoed the sentiment, referring to the typical Osage as a good-for-nothing who had attained wealth “merely because the Government unfortunately located him upon oil land which we white folks have developed for him.” John Joseph Mathews bitterly recalled reporters “enjoying the bizarre impact of wealth on the Neolithic men, with the usual smugness and wisdom of the unlearned.”

— David Grann

100. “An Osage remarked that such white men “ack like tomorrow they ain’t gonna be no more worl’.”

— David Grann