Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— David Grann

103. “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

104. “To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

108. “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

109. “A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.”

— David Grann

110. “The tribe, led by one of its greatest chiefs, James Bigheart – who spoke seven languages, among them Sioux, French, English, and Latin, and who had taken to wearing a suit –.”

— David Grann

111. “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

112. “The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens:.”

— David Grann

113. “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

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

— David Grann

115. “Though Brian was only in his late thirties, his life had been scarred by death: not only had he lost his father and brother, but his first wife had died of diabetes when she was seven months pregnant. He had since remarried, yet there were no children, and he suffered spells of what he called “wild, despairing sorrows.”

— David Grann

116. “If he is not bumped off too soon he can do us a.”

— David Grann

117. “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

118. “Deliberate and thoughtful, he had an ability to study each situation before choosing a course of action.”

— David Grann

119. “So the Osage bought the territory for seventy cents per acre and, in the early 1870s, began their exodus.”

— David Grann

120. “An entire subgenre of self-help literature devoted to analyzing his methods emerged, books with titles like Leading at the Edge: Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition. Another example, Shackleton: Leadership Lessons from Antarctica, included such chapters as “Be My Tent Mate: Keep Dissidents Close,” “Camaraderie at 20 Below Zero: Creating an Optimal Work Environment,” and “Sailing Uncharted Waters: Adapt and Innovate.”

— David Grann

121. “The challenges of managing the prison – which was designed to hold twelve hundred inmates but instead had three times that number – were overwhelming. In the summer, the temperatures inside rose as high as 115 degrees, which is why prisoners would later call Leavenworth the Hot House.”

— David Grann

122. “Its massive wooden hull, 144 feet long and 40 feet wide, was moored at a slip.”

— David Grann

123. “The midshipmen apprised Cheap of what had happened and told him about the island.”

— David Grann

124. “Each hour of the day corresponds to fifteen degrees of longitude.”

— David Grann

125. “Hale had remained close with the county prosecutor and conferred with him and other officials about Anna’s murder. Eventually, the county prosecutor decided to look again for the bullet that had eluded investigators during Anna’s autopsy.”

— David Grann

126. “Tom’s sergeant was shot six times by an assailant, while a bystander was struck twice. As the sergeant lay on the ground, bleeding, he asked for a slip of paper and scribbled on it a message for Ranger headquarters: “I am shot all to pieces. Everything quiet.” Somehow, he survived his wounds, but the innocent bystander died.”

— David Grann

127. “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

128. “The ancient city, with its network of roads and bridges and temples, was believed to be hidden in the Amazon, the largest jungle in the world. In an age of airplanes and satellites, the area remains one of the last blank spaces on the map.”

— David Grann

129. “When, the following year, Oklahoma entered the Union as the forty-sixth state, members of the tribe were able to sell their surface land in what was now Osage County. But to keep the mineral trust under tribal control, no one could buy or sell headrights. These could only be inherited. Mollie and her family had become part of the first underground reservation.”

— David Grann

130. “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

131. “In five years, if the oil map continues to shift, the tribe may have to go back to work.”

— David Grann

132. “Every time Worsley made an offer, a person bidding anonymously over the telephone countered him and finally made off with the prize, at a price of seven thousand dollars. Weeks later, on his tenth wedding anniversary, Joanna gave him a present: the inscribed book. Each had been unaware that the other was the rival bidder.”

— David Grann

133. “After White told Hoover that he had occasionally given an agent a 100 rating, Hoover responded sharply, writing, “I regret that I am unable to bring myself to believe that any agent in the jurisdiction of the Bureau is entitled to a perfect or 100% rating.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

135. “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

136. “Twice a year, when Lizzie and Ne-kah-e-se-y were young, their families and the rest of the tribe would pack their few earthly possessions – clothing, bedding, blankets, utensils, dried meat, weapons – lash them to horses, and set out on a sacred, two-month buffalo hunt.”

— David Grann

137. “On March 1, 1926, White and the prosecution.”

— David Grann

138. “Passion for something can easily tip into obsession, which is a dangerous thing, especially when those affected are they very people who so loyally stand and wait. -Henry Worsley.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

140. “Whale bones were honed into chisels and barbed tips for harpoons and spears; dolphins’ jawbones made fine combs. The skin and sinewy tendons from seals and whales offered string for bows, slingshots, and fishing nets. Seal bladders served as pouches. Plants were woven into baskets. Bark was carved into containers – and used as torches. Shells became everything from scoops to knives sharp enough to cut through bone. And the hides from seals and sea lions provided.”

— David Grann

141. “The island offered no “sign of culture,” according to Byron. But it offered an escape:.”

— David Grann

142. “On one corpse the eyes were eaten out, on another the cheeks.”

— David Grann

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

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

— David Grann

147. “For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed to the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression... Only in the mid 19th century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots – after the dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed the dread of the state – did police departments emerge in the United States.”

— David Grann

148. “Harding’s nomination had cost him and his interests $1 million. But with Harding in the White House, a historian noted, “the oil men licked their chops.” Sinclair funneled, through the cover of a bogus company, more than $200,000 to the new secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall; another oilman had his son deliver to the secretary $100,000 in a black bag.”

— David Grann

149. “White began putting together a squad of Cowboys, but he didn’t include Doc: since serving in the Rangers, he and his brother had avoided being assigned to the same cases, in order to protect their family from potentially losing two members at once.”

— David Grann

150. “The archive reflects the human need to document every deed and directive, to place a veil of administrative tidiness over the disorder of famines and plagues and natural disasters and crimes and wars.”

— David Grann