Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “We are all well and satisfied with the amount and variety of work our good fortune has given us to do.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

453. “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

454. “They have such confidence,” he said. “It is a grave responsibility.”

— Erik Larson

455. “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

456. “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

457. “Deploying flattery leavened with irony, he began:.”

— Erik Larson

458. “His demand for fine things, especially those rendered in gold, was fed as well by a kind of institutional larceny.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

460. “Speed Bonnie Boat.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “With that as my guiding question, I set out on what became a lengthy journey through the vast and tangled forest of Churchill scholarship, a realm of giant volumes, distorted facts, and bizarre conspiracy theories, to try to find my personal Churchill. As I’ve discovered with prior books, when you look at the past through a fresh lens, you invariably see the world differently and find new material and insights even along well-trodden paths.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

469. “At his own home, however, Goebbels found himself increasingly mired, not unhappily, in preparations for the holiday. He and his wife, Magda, had six children, all of whose names began with H: Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig, and Heidrun, the last just a month and a half old. The couple also had an older son, Harald, from Magda’s previous marriage. The children were excited, as was Magda, “who thinks about nothing but Christmas,” Goebbels wrote.”

— Erik Larson

470. “He added beneath his name a single word: “Finis.”

— Erik Larson

471. “I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.”

— Erik Larson

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Erik Larson

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “They looked more like day laborers than seamen.”

— Erik Larson

479. “The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire.”

— Erik Larson

480. “But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.”

— Erik Larson

481. “Turner, that day, was master of one of the great greyhounds of the North Atlantic – and looked the part.”

— Erik Larson

482. “If you worked to advance the interests of the machine, the machine paid you back.”

— Erik Larson

483. “Suddenly everyone began paying attention to the phases of the moon. Bombers could attack by day, of course, but it was thought that after dark they would be able to find their targets only by moonlight. The full moon and its waxing and waning gibbous phases became known as the “bomber’s moon.”

— Erik Larson

484. “The list of appetizers included stuffed eagles’ eggs.”

— Erik Larson

485. “The wheel had consumed 28,416 pounds of bolts in its assembly;.”

— Erik Larson

486. “Here she joined the universal struggle shared by men and women throughout time, to temper rejection so as not to lose a friend forever.”

— Erik Larson

487. “New York’s perennial attraction was shopping.”

— Erik Larson

488. “One young navy man, Ludovic Kennedy, later to achieve fame as a journalist and broadcaster, recalled how “when we heard it, we knew in an instant, that everything would be all right.”

— Erik Larson

489. “Churchill did not and frankly could not manage the staggering pressure of directing the war by himself. He relied heavily on others, even if sometimes these others merely served as an audience on whom he could test his thoughts and plans.”

— Erik Larson

490. “Nor could one have imagined that such a terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern times.” Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger. Even the army had stood by, despite the murder of two of its generals.”

— Erik Larson

491. “Mayor Harrison warned that the ranks of the unemployed had swollen to an alarming degree. “If Congress does not give us money we will have riots that will shake this country,” he said. Two weeks later workers scuffled with police outside City Hall. It was a minor confrontation, but the Tribune called it a riot.”

— Erik Larson

492. “It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner.”

— Erik Larson

493. “In Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days. That.”

— Erik Larson

494. “Lost children filled every chair at the headquarters of the Columbian Guard; nineteen spent the night and were claimed by their parents the next day.”

— Erik Larson

495. “In his dispatches Messersmith reprised one theme again and again: how impossible it was for casual visitors to understand what was really happening in this new Germany. “The Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences of the Government and their time so taken up by pleasant entertainment, that they will have little opportunity to learn what the real situation is.”

— Erik Larson

496. “Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly.”

— Erik Larson

497. “All the ship had to do was make another turn, away from U-20, and the chase would be over.”

— Erik Larson

498. “Slowly the energy left her, and her hands began to move in slow arcs, soothing and sensuous, the wild drums silent. Ballet now, a pastoral exit.”

— Erik Larson

499. “This was the year in which Churchill became Churchill, the cigar-smoking bulldog we all think we know, when he made his greatest speeches and showed the world what courage and leadership looked like.”

— Erik Larson

500. “Dodd could not grasp how these things could be occurring in the Germany he had known and loved as a young scholar in Leipzig.”

— Erik Larson