Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “If we can’t be safe, let us at least be comfortable.”

— Erik Larson

152. “They found a city steaming with heat – 91 degrees on Tuesday, April 27, with four days yet to go until “Straw Hat Day,” Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule. A Times reporter did an impromptu visual survey of Broadway and spotted only two straw hats. “Thousands of sweltering, uncomfortable men plodded along with their winter headgear at all angles on their uncomfortable heads or carried in their hot, moist hands.”

— Erik Larson

153. “German navy had its own tradition of assigning nicknames. One very tall commander was nicknamed Seestiefel, or sea boot. Another had a reputation for smelling bad and thus was nicknamed Hein Schniefelig, or stinky person. A third was said to be “very childish and good-natured” and was commonly called Das Kind, the child.”

— Erik Larson

154. “Yet by tracing the migration of guns, one comes readily and vividly to understand where the nation’s current patchwork of gun controls have gone astray, and how easily they could be fixed to the increased satisfaction of gun owners and gun opponents alike.”

— Erik Larson

155. “A dozen or so miles out, Churchill abruptly asked, “Where is Nelson?” Meaning, of course, the cat. Nelson was not in the car; nor did he appear to be in any of the other vehicles. Churchill ordered his driver to turn around and go back to No. 10. There, a secretary cornered the terrified cat and trapped him under a wastebasket. With Nelson safely aboard, the cars resumed their journey. –.”

— Erik Larson

156. “The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.”

— Erik Larson

157. “I don’t listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself – kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood.”

— Erik Larson

158. “Churchill’s great trick – one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again – was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.”

— Erik Larson

159. “Where in May 1915 the navy had only thirty U-boats, by 1917 it had more than one hundred, many larger and more powerful than Schwieger’s U-20 and carrying more torpedoes.”

— Erik Larson

160. “Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?”

— Erik Larson

161. “From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.”

— Erik Larson

162. “I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland. I find it all infinitely sad, but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. – Dora Root.”

— Erik Larson

163. “A Grape-Nuts ad dealt with warfare, but of the schoolyard variety, extolling the cereal’s value in helping children prevail in fistfights: “Husky bodies and stout nerves depend – more often than we think – on the food eaten.”

— Erik Larson

164. “In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.”

— Erik Larson

165. “All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed,” he said. Or this: “One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.”

— Erik Larson

166. “The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.”

— Erik Larson

167. “Homicide, or rather the homicide fantasy, is the engine that drives America’s fascination with guns. Target shooters spend hour after hour.”

— Erik Larson

168. “Another man packed a gold seal for stamping wax on the back of an envelope, with the Latin motto Tuta Tenebo, “I will keep you safe.”

— Erik Larson

169. “All I hope is that it is not too late... I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have – whatever there may be left to us.”

— Erik Larson

170. “People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. “All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gas-masks,” wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. “They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: ‘There’ll always be an England.”

— Erik Larson

171. “Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo. He moved with ease and confidence, yet unlike Putzi Hanfstaengl, who invaded a room, he entered unobtrusively, seeping in like a malevolent fog.”

— Erik Larson

172. “Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.”

— Erik Larson

173. “These were men, wrote Lincoln Steffens, “who will not have an office unless it is up where the air is cool and fresh, the outlook broad and beautiful, and where there is silence in the heart of business.”

— Erik Larson

174. “In the following pages I tell the story of these men and this event, but I must insert here a notice: However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction.”

— Erik Larson

175. “Jack the Ripper became the embodiment, forever, of pure evil. Every Chicago resident who could read devoured these reports from abroad, but none with quite so much intensity as Dr. H. H. Holmes.”

— Erik Larson

176. “Galveston was too pretty, too progressive, too prosperous – entirely too hopeful – to be true.”

— Erik Larson

177. “A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy.”

— Erik Larson

178. “Ambition had been the curse of my husband’s life. He wanted to attain a position where he would be honored and respected. He wanted wealth.”

— Erik Larson

179. “Unmistakable and invulnerable, a floating village in steel, the Lusitania glided by in the night as a giant black shadow cast upon the sea.”

— Erik Larson

180. “There would be miracles at the fair – the chocolate Venus de Milo would not melt, the 22,000-pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion would not mold –.”

— Erik Larson

181. “You’ll see it lovely. I never will. But it will be lovely.”

— Erik Larson

182. “When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves in which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.”

— Erik Larson

183. “The edition was full of fresh detail about the North London Cellar Murder and the escalating search for two suspects, a doctor and his lover.”

— Erik Larson

184. “Five months after the disaster, Charles Lauriat wrote a book about his experience, entitled The Lusitania’s Last Voyage.”

— Erik Larson

185. “THAT DAY, AS A herald of the invasion that seemed soon to come, the Germans seized and occupied Guernsey, a British dependency in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, less than two hundred air miles from Chequers. It was a minor action – the Germans held the island with only 469 soldiers – but troubling all the same.”

— Erik Larson

186. “Kennedy, in turn, was not well liked in London. The wife of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, detested the ambassador for his pessimism about Britain’s chances for survival and his prediction that the RAF would quickly be crushed. She wrote, “I could have killed him with pleasure.”

— Erik Larson

187. “Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have been changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?”

— Erik Larson

188. “With the onset of winter Burnham ordered all hydrants packed in horse manure to prevent freezing. On the coldest days the manure steamed, as if the hydrants themselves were on fire.”

— Erik Larson

189. “He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.”

— Erik Larson

190. “Straw Hat Day,” Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule.”

— Erik Larson

191. “Gleichschaltung.”

— Erik Larson

192. “It was because I had seen so much of injustice and domineering little groups, as well as heard the complaints of so many of the best people of the country, that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.”

— Erik Larson

193. “Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: “Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem.”

— Erik Larson

194. “No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.”

— Erik Larson

195. “Damn those bloody Huns for breaking up an enjoyable party.”

— Erik Larson

196. “I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

— Erik Larson

197. “Ferris had created more than simply an engineering novelty. Like the inventors of the elevator, he had conjured an entirely new physical sensation.”

— Erik Larson

198. “At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop “to release some priceless quotation or thought.” During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. “As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage.” He danced on.”

— Erik Larson

199. “Once, in a time long past when men believed they could part mountains, a very different building stood in the Wal-Mart’s place, and behind its mist-clouded windows ninety-three children who did not know better happily awaited the coming of the sea.”

— Erik Larson

200. “Yet gun dealers sell guns in America the way Rite Aid sells toothpaste, denying at every step of the way the true nature of the products they sell and absolving themselves of any and all responsibility for their role in the resulting mayhem.”

— Erik Larson