Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Washington Bridge. The components were then lowered into the Thirtieth Street hole by a special crane that could withstand.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

162. “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

163. “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

164. “Doc recalled the simple advice that his father gave him upon becoming a lawman: “Get all the evidence you can, son. Then put yourself in the criminal’s place. Think it out. Plug up those holes, son.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

166. “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

167. “American buffalo to hunt –.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

176. “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

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

— David Grann

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— David Grann

183. “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

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

— David Grann

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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