Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders.”

— David Grann

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

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

— David Grann

56. “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

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

— David Grann

58. “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

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

— David Grann

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— David Grann

64. “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

65. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

70. “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

71. “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

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

— David Grann

73. “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

74. “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

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

— David Grann

76. “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

77. “Hale was determined to transform not only himself but the wilderness from which he came – to cross-fence the open prairie and to create a network of trading posts and towns.”

— David Grann

78. “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

79. “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

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. “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

82. “The instruction was intended to assimilate Mollie into white society and transform her into what the authorities conceived of as the ideal woman.”

— David Grann

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”

— David Grann

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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

— David Grann

96. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

100. “In 1850, Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company’s motto, “We Never Sleep,” was inscribed under a large, unblinking, Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term “private eye.”

— David Grann