Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Isaac, at this point, still considered Moore a personal friend. It hurt him, no doubt, that Moore had distorted the story of his experience in the storm. Isaac had lost his wife and home, and had nearly lost a daughter, but Moore could not be bothered with the actual details.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

453. “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

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

— Erik Larson

455. “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

456. “Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre,” Stead wrote, “but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream, silent as a city of the dead.”

— Erik Larson

457. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

— Erik Larson

458. “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

459. “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

460. “She saw Hitler as “a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin.” Like many others in America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him lasting very long or being taken seriously.”

— Erik Larson

461. “During heavy rains, river water flowed in a greasy plume far out into Lake Michigan, to the towers that marked the intake pipes for the city’s drinking water.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

463. “Facts are better than dreams.”

— Erik Larson

464. “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

465. “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

466. “The man condemned for having ‘wheels in his head’ had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance.”

— Erik Larson

467. “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

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

— Erik Larson

469. “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

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

— Erik Larson

471. “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

472. “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

473. “However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

476. “Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

479. “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

480. “By his own careful measure, he consumed up to two hundred grams of sugar a day, equivalent to forty-eight teaspoons.”

— Erik Larson

481. “In the glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast’s card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.”

— Erik Larson

482. “Root was a notorious bon vivant, whom Louis Sullivan once described as “a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil.”

— Erik Larson

483. “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

484. “My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?” He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ, liebes Kind,” he said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful.”

— Erik Larson

485. “In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.”

— Erik Larson

486. “A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection. The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.”

— Erik Larson

487. “When the conversation turned to Germany’s persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings” but added a caveat: “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.” In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd.”

— Erik Larson

488. “One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans.”

— Erik Larson

489. “At Randolph-Macon, Dodd promptly got himself into hot water. In 1902 he published an article in the Nation in which he attacked a successful campaign by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans to have Virginia ban a history textbook that the veterans deemed an affront to southern honor. Dodd charged that the veterans believed the only valid histories were those that held that the South “was altogether right in seceding from the Union.”

— Erik Larson

490. “Murder was a fascination as always.”

— Erik Larson

491. “Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts,” she wrote; “and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.”

— Erik Larson

492. “But fighter production lagged. England’s aircraft plants operated on a prewar schedule that did not take into account the new reality of having a hostile force based just across the channel. Production, though increasing, was suppressed by the fusty practices of a peacetime bureaucracy only now awakening to the realities of total war. Shortages of parts and materials disrupted production.”

— Erik Larson

493. “The Death of Boris,’ by Mussorgsky?”

— Erik Larson

494. “We are all well and satisfied with the amount and variety of work our good fortune has given us to do.”

— Erik Larson

495. “Tears come without any provocation.10 Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate.11 “Always be happy.” It did not work.”

— Erik Larson

496. “Night is the magician of the fair.”

— Erik Larson

497. “William Manchester and Paul Reid’s Defender of the Realm, Roy Jenkins’s Churchill, and Martin Gilbert’s Finest Hour – but then to plunge.”

— Erik Larson

498. “Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “After all,” he told an interviewer with the Chicago Daily News later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”

— Erik Larson

499. “A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting. J. M. Barrie “Dedication” Peter Pan 1904.”

— Erik Larson

500. “The ministry’s array of “secret transmitters,” masquerading as English radio stations but based in Germany, were now to be deployed, “to arouse alarm and fear among the British people.” They were to take pains to disguise their German origins, even to the point of starting broadcasts with criticism of the Nazi Party, and fill their reports.”

— Erik Larson