Top 200 David Grann Quotes (2026 Update)
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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. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— David Grann

106. “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

107. “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

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. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— David Grann

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “He had made a fire – that spark of civilization – and they huddled around the flames, trying to warm themselves.”

— David Grann

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “In a lethal, floating chess game, these pieces were deployed around the globe to achieve what 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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

138. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

142. “Even if they succeeded and made it back to England, they could be court-martialed by a panel of Cheap’s fellow officers and condemned to take a walk up Ladder Lane and down Hemp Street. As a historian once put it, “A mutiny is like a horrible, malignant disease and the chances that the patient will die an agonizing death are so great, that the subject cannot even be mentioned aloud.”

— David Grann

143. “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

144. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

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

— David Grann