Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Man plans, God laughs.”

— Erik Larson

2. “I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair, but I’ve learned the devil a lot in the last five minutes.”

— Erik Larson

3. “I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.”

— Erik Larson

4. “Oh, Moon, lovely Moon, with thy beautiful face Careering throughout the boundaries of space Whenever I see thee, I think in my mind Shall I ever, oh ever, behold thy behind.”

— Erik Larson

5. “After one raid set London’s Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen’s hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa – Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old.”

— Erik Larson

6. “It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago “the Windy City.”

— Erik Larson

7. “I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.”

— Erik Larson

8. “His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.”

— Erik Larson

9. “The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.”

— Erik Larson

10. “Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world.”

— Erik Larson

11. “Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.”

— Erik Larson

12. “No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.”

— Erik Larson

13. “Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.”

— Erik Larson

14. “Between the lights and the ever-present blue ghosts of the Columbian Guard, the fair achieved another milestone: For the first time Chicagoans could stroll at night in perfect safety. This alone began to draw an increased number of visitors, especially young couples locked in the rictus of Victorian courtship and needful of quiet dark places.”

— Erik Larson

15. “As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar.”

— Erik Larson

16. “It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”

— Erik Larson

17. “In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to “a human being with his skin removed.”

— Erik Larson

18. “People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.”

— Erik Larson

19. “The first submarine ever credited with sinking an enemy ship was the Confederate navy’s H. L. Hunley, which, during the American Civil War, sank the Union navy’s frigate, the Housatonic. The Hunley, propelled by a crew of eight using hand cranks to turn its propeller, approached the Housatonic after dark, carrying a large cache of explosives at the end of a thirty-foot spar jutting from its bow. The explosion destroyed the frigate; it also sank the Hunley, which disappeared with all hands.”

— Erik Larson

20. “I tell you we must have bodies. You cannot make doctors without them, and the public must understand it. If we can’t get them any other way we will arm the students with Winchester rifles and send them to protect the body-snatchers on their raids.”

— Erik Larson

21. “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.”

— Erik Larson

22. “Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.”

— Erik Larson

23. “This prolonging of a man’s life doesn’t interest me when he’s done his work and has done it pretty well.”

— Erik Larson

24. “But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.”

— Erik Larson

25. “Lusitania, after a Roman province on the Iberian Peninsula that occupied roughly the same ground as modern-day Portugal. “The inhabitants were warlike, and the Romans conquered them with great difficulty,” said a memorandum in Cunard’s files on the naming of the ship. “They lived generally upon plunder and were rude and unpolished in their manners.” In popular usage, the name was foreshortened to “Lucy.”

— Erik Larson

26. “It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actually still apply once they had left behind their dusty, kerosene-scented parlors and set out on their own.”

— Erik Larson

27. “Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”

— Erik Larson

28. “The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.”

— Erik Larson

29. “There are no heroes here, at least not of the Schindler’s List variety, but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace.”

— Erik Larson

30. “The essence of war is violence,” he wrote, “and moderation in war is imbecility.”

— Erik Larson

31. “In this day before sonar, a submarine traveled utterly blind, trusting entirely in the accuracy of sea charts. One great fear of all U-boat men was that a half-sunk derelict or an uncharted rock might lie in their path.”

— Erik Larson

32. “It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.”

— Erik Larson

33. “Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people.”

— Erik Larson

34. “You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”

— Erik Larson

35. “No sir,” Dunwoody snapped. “It cannot be; no cyclone ever can move from Florida to Galveston.”

— Erik Larson

36. “Place has always been important to me, and one thing today’s Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.”

— Erik Larson

37. “I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word.′ The same happened at Yale, Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.”

— Erik Larson

38. “A Bridgeport, Connecticut, man presented his girlfriend with an engagement ring and handed her one end of a ribbon; the other end disappeared into his pocket. “A surprise,” he said, and urged her to pull it. She obliged. The ribbon was attached to the trigger of a revolver. The man died instantly. And.”

— Erik Larson

39. “Upon learning that Hall was the man who had invented the typewriter she used so often, the girl put her arms around his neck and gave him a huge hug and kiss. Forever afterward, whenever Hall told this story of how he met Helen Keller, tears would fill his eyes.”

— Erik Larson

40. “Passengers were crushed by descending boats. Swimmers were struck by chairs, boxes, potted plants, and other debris falling from the decks high above. And then there were those most ill-starred of passengers, who had put on their life preservers incorrectly and found themselves floating with their heads submerged, legs up, as in some devil’s comedy.”

— Erik Larson

41. “Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?”

— Erik Larson

42. “One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship’s 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot.”

— Erik Larson

43. “In conclusion,” he said, “one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.” To fail to learn from such “blunders of the past,” he said, was to end up on a course toward “another war and chaos.”

— Erik Larson

44. “Messersmith wrote. “We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.” Messersmith urged skepticism regarding Hitler’s protestations. “I think for the moment he genuinely desires peace but it is a peace of his own kind and with an armed force constantly becoming more effective in reserve, in order to impose their will when it may become essential.”

— Erik Larson

45. “But the sound frightened Isaac. The thudding, he knew, was caused by great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach. Most days the Gulf was as placid as a big lake, with surf that did not crash but rather wore itself away on the sand. The first swells had arrived Friday. Now the booming was louder and heavier, each concussion more profound.”

— Erik Larson

46. “Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.”

— Erik Larson

47. “Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.”

— Erik Larson

48. “In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone “there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders.” The Times reporter said, “Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?” “Yes,” Sumner replied; “as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever.”

— Erik Larson

49. “No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forget the feel of paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse’s flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burlap.”

— Erik Larson

50. “Burnham and Root became rich men. Not Pullman rich, not rich enough to be counted among the first rank of society alongside Potter Palmer and Philip Armour, or to have their wives’ gowns described in the city’s newspapers, but rich beyond anything either man had expected, enough so that each year Burnham bought a barrel of fine Madeira and aged it by shipping it twice around the world on slow freighters.”

— Erik Larson