Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

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

— David Grann

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

111. “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

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

— David Grann

113. “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

114. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

118. “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

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

— David Grann

120. “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

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

— David Grann

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

127. “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

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

— David Grann

129. “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

130. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

133. “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

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

— David Grann

135. “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

136. “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

137. “American buffalo to hunt –.”

— David Grann

138. “How many ships, with precious lives and cargo, had wrecked because mariners hadn’t known precisely where they were?”

— David Grann

139. “His chest was often bare, and his head was shaved, except for a strip of hair that ran from the crown to his neck and that stood straight up, like the crest of a Spartan’s helmet.”

— David Grann

140. “In the end, the castaways could not go this far. Instead, they staggered up Mount Misery and found the decayed body of their companion – the man whose spirit, they believed, had been haunting them. They dug a hole and buried him. Then they went back to the outpost and huddled together, listening to the hush of the sea.”

— David Grann

141. “Because the Amazon frontier was so isolated, it was governed by its own laws and, as one observer put it, made the American West seem by comparison “as proper as a prayer meeting.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

143. “White once sent Rudensky a note that said, “It takes a good deal of nerve to change a course that you have been on for years and years – more so, maybe than I realize, but if it is in you, now is the time to show it.” Because of White’s support, Rudensky recalled, “I had a ray of hope.”

— David Grann

144. “In 1757, Admiral John Byng would be executed after being found guilty of failing to “do his utmost” during battle, prompting Voltaire to remark in Candide that the English believed it proper to “kill an admiral from time to time in order to encourage the others.”

— David Grann

145. “By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.”

— David Grann

146. “He could serve in the Army, which many gentlemen preferred, because they could frequently sit idly on a horse looking debonair. Then there was the Navy, in which you actually had to work and get your hands dirty.”

— David Grann

147. “Altogether, nearly 300 of the Centurion’s some 500 men were eventually listed as “DD” – Discharged Dead.”

— David Grann

148. “Darwin’s theory, laid out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, suggested that people and apes shared a common ancestor, and, coupled with recent discoveries of fossils revealing that humans had been on earth far longer than the Bible stated, helped irrevocably to sever anthropology from theology.”

— David Grann

149. “President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement.”

— David Grann

150. “Fawcett was taught not just how to survey but how to see – to record and classify everything around him, in what the Greeks called an autopsis.”

— David Grann