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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— David Grann

105. “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

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

— David Grann

107. “April 1923, Governor Jack C. Walton of Oklahoma dispatched his top state investigator, Herman Fox Davis, to Osage County.”

— David Grann

108. “Anson, who was soon promoted to rear admiral, was awarded about ninety thousand pounds.”

— David Grann

109. “But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River. The Osage chief stated that his people “had no choice, they must either sign the treaty or be declared enemies of the United States.” Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas.”

— David Grann

110. “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

111. “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

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

— David Grann

113. “The jurors were willing to punish the men for killing an American Indian, but they would not hang them for it.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

115. “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

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

— David Grann

117. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— David Grann

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “He is thoroughly professional about his job. He is a serious, pleasant man, and he has trained himself to control his emotions.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

131. “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. By the time of Anna’s death, the informal system of citizen policing had been displaced, but vestiges of it remained, especially in places that still seemed to exist on the periphery of geography and history.”

— David Grann

132. “Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas. And it was in this place where Mollie’s mother and father had come of age.”

— David Grann

133. “They were taught piano, penmanship, geography, and arithmetic, the world distilled into strange new symbols.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

135. “Washington Bridge. The components were then lowered into the Thirtieth Street hole by a special crane that could withstand.”

— David Grann

136. “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

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

— David Grann

138. “He emerges in our story like one of those settlers who arrives on the American frontier with no discernable history – a man to be reckoned with by his present deeds alone.”

— David Grann

139. “It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.”

— David Grann

140. “During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga The-the, the Killer of Flowers Moon. I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.”

— David Grann

141. “She wore moccasins, leggings a cloth skirt and a blanket around her shoulders, and she painted the part in the middle of her hair red to symbolize the path of the sun.”

— David Grann

142. “Theodore Roosevelt had already warned what would befall an Indian who refused his allotment: “Let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

144. “So while Osage boys at other institutions learned farming and carpentry, Mollie was trained in the “domestic arts”:.”

— David Grann

145. “These agents were still learning scientific sleuthing, still adjusting to completing their reports on a typewriter.”

— David Grann

146. “But no man can help you die. There is room in the halls of pleasure For a long and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain.”

— David Grann

147. “Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him. The.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

149. “Other scholars point out that nineteenth and early twentieth century Europeans – even the most benignly motivated – exoticized the East, which only helped to legitimize imperialism.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann