Top 200 David Grann Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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. “We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done – or haven’t done.”

— 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. “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

166. “He vowed, “We stand or fall by the truth; if truth will not support us, nothing can.”

— 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. “Eighteenth-century British naval law has a reputation for being draconian, but it was often more flexible and forgiving in reality.”

— David Grann

172. “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

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

— David Grann

174. “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

175. “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

176. “The entries should be made as soon as possible after each event takes place, and nothing should be entered which the mate would not be willing to adhere to in a court of justice.”

— David Grann

177. “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

178. “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

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

— David Grann

180. “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

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

— David Grann

182. “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

183. “Byron and Campbell beseeched Cheap to get into a transport vessel with them. But he was resolved to abide by the code of the sea: a captain must be the last to leave his sinking ship, even if it means going down with it. “Don’t mind me,” he insisted.”

— David Grann

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests – revising, erasing, embroidering – so do nations.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

189. “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

190. “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

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

— David Grann

192. “History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

194. “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

195. “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

196. “At sea, beyond the reach of any government, he had enormous authority.”

— David Grann

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

— David Grann

198. “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

199. “Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.”

— David Grann

200. “Unlike on a battlefield, there was no fixed position at sea: a ship was always shifting with the wind and the waves and the currents.”

— David Grann