David Grann Quotes

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.

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

Fawcett once described fear as the 'motive power of all evil' which had 'excluded humanity from the Garden of Eden.

Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon

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.

Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams.

During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––"sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).

Years later, another member [of the Royal Geographical Society] conceded, 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.

Fawcett agreed that El Dorado, with its plethora of gold, was an "exaggerated romance," but he was not ready to dismiss the chronicles altogether

An Indian Affairs agent said, 'The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?

Detectives... were widely seen as surreptitious figures who burglarized other peoples secrets. ( The term "to detect" derived from the latin verb " to unroof" and because the devil, according to legend, allowed his henchmen to peer voyeuristically into houses by removing their roofs, detectives were known as 'The devils disciples

Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders.

But in 1921, just as the government had once adopted a ration system to pay the Osage for seized land - just as it always seemed to turn its gospel of enlightenment into a hammer of coercion - Congress implemented even more draconian legislation controlling how the Osage could spend their money.

As she spoke, I realized that the Reign of Terror had ravaged - still ravaged - generations. A great-grandson of Henry Roan's once spoke of the legacy of the murders: "I think somewhere it is in the back of our minds. We may not realize it, but it is there, especially if it was a family member that was killed. You just have it in the back of your head that you don't trust anybody.

In 1850 Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company motto, "We Never Sleep" was inscribed under a large, unblinking Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term "private eye".... William J. Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph- a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier.... Just as Allan Pinkerton, in the nineteenth century was known as the eye, Burns, In the twentieth century had become "the ear".

The Osage elders sang the traditional songs for the dead, only now the songs seemed for the living, for those who had to endure this world of killing.

History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.

Stores gone, post office gone, train gone, school gone, oil gone, boys and girls gone - only thing not gone is graveyard and it git bigger.

Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.

Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.

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.

You know, I had a lot of romantic notions about the jungle and this kind of finished that

I am getting older and am, I daresay, impatient of lost years and months," Fawcett complained to Keltie in early 1918. Later

Only the Indians respect the forest," Paolo said. "The white people cut it all down." Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover - an area bigger than France. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless