Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “In five years, if the oil map continues to shift, the tribe may have to go back to work.”

— David Grann

52. “The ships glided in elegant formation, with the Centurion leading the way, her sails spread like wings.”

— David Grann

53. “It seemed impossible to find twelve white men who would convict one of their own for murdering American Indians.”

— David Grann

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

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

— David Grann

60. “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

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

— David Grann

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— David Grann

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— David Grann

80. “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

81. “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

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

— David Grann

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— David Grann

89. “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

90. “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

91. “The second insurance company approved the policy after Hale took Roan to the Pawhuska doctor again for the required medical examination. The doctor recalled asking Hale, “Bill, what are you going to do, kill this Indian?” Hale, laughing, said, “Hell, yes.”

— David Grann

92. “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

93. “When a press gang surrounded a church in London, in 1755, in pursuit of a seaman inside, he managed, according to a newspaper report, to slip away disguised in “an old gentlewoman’s long cloak, hood and bonnet.”

— David Grann

94. “Robert Walpole, the country’s first prime minister, warned that the dearth of crews had rendered a third of the Navy’s ships unusable. “Oh! seamen, seamen, seamen!” he cried at a meeting.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

96. “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

97. “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

98. “Tom became increasingly adept at dealing with what he called “rascality”: cow rustlers, horse thieves, scalawags, pimps, rumrunners, stagecoach robbers, desperadoes, and other human transgressors. When.”

— David Grann

99. “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

100. “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