Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.”

— Erik Larson

59. “The reference to the Lusitania was obvious enough,” he recalled later, “but personally it never entered my mind for a moment that the Germans would actually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpability of such an act seemed too blatant and raw for an intelligent people to take upon themselves.”

— Erik Larson

60. “Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.”

— Erik Larson

61. “Berliners came to practice what became known as “the German glance” – der deutsche Blick – a quick look in all directions when encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street.”

— Erik Larson

62. “Stephen Gray to devise an experiment that for sheer inventive panache outstripped anything that had come before. He clothed a boy in heavy garments until his body was thoroughly insulated but left the boy’s hands, head, and feet naked. Using nonconducting silk strings, he hung the boy in the air, then touched an electrified glass tube to his naked foot, thus causing a spark to rocket from his nose.”

— Erik Larson

63. “Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would prevail. 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

64. “Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.”

— Erik Larson

65. “It had swept him, he said, “into a dream from which I did not recover for months.”

— Erik Larson

66. “At the Quebec prison, he had read Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, then had autographed the book and given it to a guard for a souvenir.”

— Erik Larson

67. “And just before the heat wave, a rising young British writer had published a scalding essay on Chicago. “Having seen it,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”

— Erik Larson

68. “Boswell and Thompson write, “Every night the rooms on the two upper floors of the Castle were filled to overflowing. Holmes reluctantly accommodated a few men as paying guests, but catered primarily to women – preferably young and pretty ones of apparent means, whose homes were distant from Chicago and who had no one close to them who might make inquiry if they did not soon return. Many never went home. Many, indeed, never emerged from the castle, having once entered it.”

— Erik Larson

69. “How easy it was to disappear: A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago.”

— Erik Larson

70. “Holmes cast himself as a demanding contractor. As workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. They quit, or he fired them. He recruited others to replace them and treated these workers the same way. Construction proceeded slowly, but at a fraction of the proper cost. The high rate of turnover had the corollary benefit of keeping to a minimum the number of individuals who understood the building’s secrets. A.”

— Erik Larson

71. “The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism. “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”

— Erik Larson

72. “In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed one another rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot one another by accident.”

— Erik Larson

73. “She asked, what would he do if a lady happened to insist? Turner replied, “Madam, do you think that would be a lady?”

— Erik Larson

74. “He added: “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”

— Erik Larson

75. “Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. It.”

— Erik Larson

76. “At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting.”

— Erik Larson

77. “American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany’s persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.”

— Erik Larson

78. “He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress uniform still on the bridge as the Lusitania began its final dive.”

— Erik Larson

79. “Margaret and James Shineman, newlyweds from Oil City, Wyoming, who suddenly found themselves aboard the fastest, most luxurious ship in service, for their journey to Scotland to visit Margaret’s family. The visit was to be a surprise. Both were killed.”

— Erik Larson

80. “That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far as possible, to cripple the World’s Fair.”

— Erik Larson

81. “But Burnham also created an office culture that anticipated that of businesses that would not appear for another century. He installed a gym. During lunch hour employees played handball. Burnham gave fencing lessons. Root played impromptu recitals on a rented piano. “The office was full of a rush of work,” Starrett said, “but the spirit of the place was delightfully free and easy and human in comparison with other offices I had worked in.”

— Erik Larson

82. “On Monday, May 10, the coroner’s jury issued its finding: that the submarine’s officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed “willful and wholesale murder.” Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty, ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, “That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the Lusitania against attack.”

— Erik Larson

83. “THE ADMIRALTY’S focus was elsewhere, on a different ship that it deemed far more valuable.”

— Erik Larson

84. “What he craved was possession and the power it gave him; what he adored was anticipation – the slow acquisition of love, then life, and finally the secrets within. The ultimate disposition of the material was irrelevant, a recreation.”

— Erik Larson

85. “Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany,” she wrote. “Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad – and do horrible things.”

— Erik Larson

86. “What Edith did not yet appreciate was that Wilson was now a man in love, and as White House usher Ike Hoover observed, Wilson was “no mean man in love-making when once the germ has found its resting place.”

— Erik Larson

87. “One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.” Churchill had a formula for family size as well. Four children was the ideal number: “One to reproduce your wife, one to reproduce yourself, one for the increase in population, and one in case of accident.”

— Erik Larson

88. “The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the contentions and animosities and the ceaseless pressure and counter-pressure that distract the close-packed older world.” While.”

— Erik Larson

89. “At the first of the funerals the bishop of Coventry said, “Let us vow before God to be better friends and neighbors in the future, because we have suffered this together and have stood here today.”

— Erik Larson

90. “He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, “You’ll see it lovely. I never will. But it WILL be lovely.”

— Erik Larson

91. “It instructed Germany’s ambassador in Mexico to offer Mexican president Venustiano Carranza an alliance, to take effect if the new submarine campaign drew America into the war. “Make war together,” Zimmermann proposed. “Make peace together.” In return, Germany would take measures to help Mexico seize previously held lands – “lost territory” – in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”

— Erik Larson

92. “At present,” he said, “I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland.”

— Erik Larson

93. “There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.”

— Erik Larson

94. “Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process.”

— Erik Larson

95. “There’s something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.”

— Erik Larson

96. “I’m very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I’m instantly disinclined to do so.”

— Erik Larson

97. “Of the four men in Preston Prichard’s cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.”

— Erik Larson

98. “Dodd listened intently as Hitler portrayed Germany as a well-meaning, peace-seeking nation whose modest desire for equality of armaments was being opposed by other nations. ‘It was not the address of a thinker,’ Dodd wrote in his diary, ’but of an emotionalist claiming that Germany had in no way been responsible for the World War and that she was the victim of wicked enemies.”

— Erik Larson

99. “I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.”

— Erik Larson

100. “One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: “Alive.”

— Erik Larson