Top 180 David Grann Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “American buffalo to hunt –.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— David Grann

161. “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

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

— David Grann

163. “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

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. “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

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

— David Grann

168. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

171. “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

172. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— David Grann

183. “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

184. “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

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

— David Grann

186. “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

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