Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.”

— Erik Larson

452. “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

453. “Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem.”

— Erik Larson

454. “In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall.”

— Erik Larson

455. “The becomingness of everything that may be seen as a modestly contributive part of a grand whole.”

— Erik Larson

456. “What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate – or even downright dangerous?” To Battersby, it typified “the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill” – his ability to transform “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.”

— Erik Larson

457. “A woman who may report on a neighbor for disloyalty and jeopardize his life, even cause his death, takes her big kindly-looking dog in the Tiergarten for a walk. She talks to him and coddles him as she sits on a bench and he attends to the requirements of nature.”

— Erik Larson

458. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

461. “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

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

— Erik Larson

463. “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

464. “Far from a clamor for war, there existed a widespread, if naive, belief that war of the kind that had convulsed Europe in past centuries had become obsolete – that the economies of nations were so closely connected with one another that even if a war were to begin, it would end quickly.”

— Erik Larson

465. “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.”

— Erik Larson

466. “Burnham’s frequent admonition: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Burnham.”

— Erik Larson

467. “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”

— Erik Larson

468. “In honor of the fair Kodak called the folding version of its popular model No. 4 box camera the Columbus. The photographs these new cameras created were fast becoming known as “snap-shots,” a term originally used by English hunters to describe a quick shot with a gun.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

470. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

474. “The two often sheltered from air raids in the room of another resident, Australian prime minister Menzies, whom Pamela had come to know well because of her connection to the Churchills. Menzies occupied a large suite on the Dorchester’s much-coveted first floor. The women spent nights on mattresses laid out in its windowless entry alcove. Now.”

— Erik Larson

475. “She and a friend joked about what to do if the ship were attacked. “Our stewardess laughed,” Mrs. Lines recalled, “and said we would not go down, but up, as we were well loaded with munitions.”

— Erik Larson

476. “My prophetic task would be twofold: to stand up to him, and to stand by him. To awaken his conscience, and to salve the pain this would cause him.”

— Erik Larson

477. “Indeed, anti-immigration sentiment in America would remain strong into 1938, when a Fortune poll reported that some two-thirds of those surveyed favored keeping refugees out of the country.”

— Erik Larson

478. “I didn’t believe all her stories,” Martha wrote later. “I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical.” When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression.”

— Erik Larson

479. “He often carried a revolver – and often misplaced it, according to Inspector Thompson. From time to time, Thompson recalled, Churchill would abruptly brandish his revolver and, “roguishly and with delight,” exclaim: “You see, Thompson, they will never take me alive! I will get one or two before they can shoot me down.”

— Erik Larson

480. “After a few minutes, Churchill broke the silence, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The remark had such power that Ismay quoted it to his wife after returning home. He had no idea that Churchill would soon deploy the line in one of his most famous speeches.”

— Erik Larson

481. “Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening.”

— Erik Larson

482. “He told Hitler, “There is evident injustice in the French attitude; but defeat in war is always followed by injustice.” He raised the example of the aftermath of the American Civil War and the North’s “terrible” treatment of the South.”

— Erik Larson

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

489. “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

490. “After noting that Germany’s submarine campaign had sharply reduced traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman: “For our part, we want the traffic – the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”

— Erik Larson

491. “But I had at least hoped to find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards.” Fromm.”

— Erik Larson

492. “Churchill saw the relationship in succinct terms. “Some take drugs,” he said. “I take Max.”

— Erik Larson

493. “Speed Bonnie Boat.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “It could be done, because it had to be done.”

— Erik Larson

500. “Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

— Erik Larson