Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The Fringes of Power; the work.”

— Erik Larson

452. “Let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind. – Grover Cleveland.”

— Erik Larson

453. “Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.”

— Erik Larson

454. “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”

— Erik Larson

455. “He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds.”

— Erik Larson

456. “Edith wrote later, “This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ’turn a corner and meet your fate.”

— Erik Larson

457. “I was inclined to think him Jewish,” she wrote; she “considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.”

— Erik Larson

458. “All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.”

— Erik Larson

459. “The Admiralty was well aware the Lusitania would soon traverse these same waters but made no effort to provide specifics of the night’s events directly to Captain Turner.”

— Erik Larson

460. “You know, of course,” Dodd said, “that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life.”

— Erik Larson

461. “Chamberlain, borrowing words used by Oliver Cromwell in 1653: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”

— Erik Larson

462. “As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families.”

— Erik Larson

463. “He wrote, “It is so humiliating to me to shake hands with known and confessed murderers.”

— Erik Larson

464. “From the start, Churchill and Fisher resolved to keep the operation so secret that only they and a few other Admiralty officials would ever know it existed.”

— Erik Larson

465. “In losing her he lost not merely his main source of companionship but also his primary adviser, whose observations he had found so useful in helping shape his own thinking.”

— Erik Larson

466. “There are some things I must try to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.”

— Erik Larson

467. “Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.”

— Erik Larson

468. “But far more than France was at stake, he added. He raised the specter of Britain, too, succumbing to Hitler’s influence and warned that a new and pro-German government might then replace his own. “If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.”

— Erik Larson

469. “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.”

— Erik Larson

470. “It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”

— Erik Larson

471. “Dodd’s main reason for wanting to see Dieckhoff was to express his dismay at having been made to seem naive by Goebbels’s Jews-as-syphilis speech after all he had done to quiet Jewish protests in America.”

— Erik Larson

472. “He sensed a rising “hysteria” among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief “that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.”

— Erik Larson

473. “The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening.”

— Erik Larson

474. “For those passengers who did feel unsettled by the German warning, Cunard offered comforting words. Wrote passenger Ambrose B. Cross, “From the very first the ship’s people asseverated that we ran no danger, that we should run right away from any submarine, or ram her, and so on, so that the idea came to be regarded as a mild joke for lunch and dinner tables.”

— Erik Larson

475. “What most likely caused the second event was the rupture of a main steam line, carrying steam under extreme pressure. This was Turner’s theory from the beginning.”

— Erik Larson

476. “On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed.”

— Erik Larson

477. “The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, “The election here is a farce.” Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners – 96 percent – voted in favor of Hitler’s government. On.”

— Erik Larson

478. “Another raid followed on January 31, during which nine airships flew as far as Liverpool, along the way sending terrifying shadows scudding across the landscape of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.”

— Erik Larson

479. “The rest, with faces contorted from the strain of trying to listen, saw distant men gesturing wildly into the sound-killing miasma of whispers, coughs and creaking shoe leather.”

— Erik Larson

480. “The delay you are causing us by not forwarding scale drawings is embarrassing in the extreme.”

— Erik Larson

481. “Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail – his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname “Forty-Page George.”

— Erik Larson

482. “He feared that now he appeared naive.”

— Erik Larson

483. “No other British city experienced such losses, but throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured. Of the dead, 5,626 were children.”

— Erik Larson

484. “Round My House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and War, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Wilson.”

— Erik Larson

485. “Whether out of professional pique or some instinct of fear, the ship’s mascot – a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner’s predecessor – fled the ship that night, for points unknown.”

— Erik Larson

486. “Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens. Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In.”

— Erik Larson

487. “In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.”

— Erik Larson

488. “If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years.”

— Erik Larson

489. “At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”

— Erik Larson

490. “It is not given to human beings – happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable – to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.”

— Erik Larson

491. “His overall appearance was striking, that of a damaged Ray Milland – a “cruel, broken beauty,” as Martha put.”

— Erik Larson

492. “Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance.”

— Erik Larson

493. “Winston had grave concerns, and that she regretted letting the romance progress to this point without expressing their doubts and fears. This was only partly true: In fact, Churchill, preoccupied with war matters, had few concerns about the engagement and was more than content to let Clementine manage the situation. Thus far that weekend, his main interests had.”

— Erik Larson

494. “Mistrust must be sown of the plutocratic ruling caste, and fear must be instilled of what is about to befall. All this must be laid on as thick as possible.”

— Erik Larson

495. “Captain Hall had no direct control over Room 40 – as of early 1915 his intelligence division and Room 40 were separate entities – but his name more than any other would come to be associated with its achievements.”

— Erik Larson

496. “Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences of the Government and.”

— Erik Larson

497. “He was a loner and intellectually intolerant.”

— Erik Larson

498. “During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.”

— Erik Larson

499. “Hall withdrew the manuscript, though his notes and a number of completed chapters reside today in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, England.”

— Erik Larson

500. “Fires were still raging all over the place; some of the larger buildings were mere skeletons, and many of the smaller houses had been reduced to piles of rubble.” He was struck in particular by the sight of paper Union Jacks planted in mounds of shattered lumber and brick. These, he wrote, “brought a lump to one’s throat.”

— Erik Larson