141 Quotes by David Grann

While most of my articles seem unrelated, they typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things – things that most of us would never dare – who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.

For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression. Instead, citizens responded to a hue and cry by chasing after suspects.

White gave his men advice in case their cover was blown: “Keep your balance, avoid any rough stuff if possible.” Making it clear that they should carry weapons, he added, “But if you have to fight to survive, do a good job.

Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.

Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.

A growing number of white Americans expressed alarm over the Osage’s wealth –.

The historian Burns once wrote, “To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.

They marched like madmen from place to place, until overcome by exhaustion and lack of strength they could no longer move from one side to the other, and they remained there, wherever this sad siren voice had summoned them, self-important, and dead.

Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.