Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “It was night time, Inspector Thompson wrote. Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up. Washington represented something immensely precious. Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for two years. My heart filled.”

— Erik Larson

202. “Late that afternoon, he devoted two quiet hours to his Old South, losing himself in another, more chivalrous age.”

— Erik Larson

203. “German people, he said, would follow Hitler with absolute loyalty “provided they are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors.” The time had come, he proclaimed, “to silence doctrinaire fanatics.”

— Erik Larson

204. “He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.”

— Erik Larson

205. “No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.”

— Erik Larson

206. “Where Room 40 promised to give Britain the clearest advantage was in the battle for control of the seas, and there Britain’s strategy had undergone a change.”

— Erik Larson

207. “Holmes explained that he had been doing some dissection but now had completed his research. He offered Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and return to him a fully articulated skeleton. Chappell agreed. Holmes and Chappell placed the body in a trunk lined with duckcloth. An express company delivered it to Chappell’s house.”

— Erik Larson

208. “On May 10, 1933, the Nazi Party burned unwelcome books – Einstein, Freud, the brothers Mann, and many others – in great pyres throughout Germany, but seven days later Hitler declared himself committed to peace and went so far as to pledge complete disarmament if other countries followed suit. The world swooned with relief.”

— Erik Larson

209. “According to Home Intelligence, “People living near guns are suffering from serious lack of sleep: a number of interviews made round one gun in West London showed that people were getting much less sleep than others a few hundred yards away.” But no one wanted the guns to stop. “There is little complaint about lack of sleep, mainly because of the new exhilaration created by the barrage. Nevertheless this serious loss of sleep needs watching.”

— Erik Larson

210. “Up to our time,” he said, “strict economy in the use of natural resources has not been practiced, but it must be henceforth unless we are immoral enough to impair conditions in.”

— Erik Larson

211. “At first alienists describes this condition as “moral insanity” and those who exhibited the disorder as “moral imbeciles.” They later adopted the term “psychopath”.”

— Erik Larson

212. “Do you think all these people would be booking passage on the Lusitania if they thought she could be caught by a German submarine? Why it’s the best joke I’ve heard in many days, this talk of torpedoing the Lusitania.′ Both Vanderbilt and Turner laughed.”

— Erik Larson

213. “Chicago’s merchant princes like devils. George Pullman continued to cut jobs and wages without reducing rents, even though his company’s treasury was flush with over $60 million in cash. Pullman’s friends cautioned that he was being pigheaded and had underestimated the anger of his workers. He moved his family out of Chicago and hid his best china. On.”

— Erik Larson

214. “Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular.”

— Erik Larson

215. “Whenever they come up against someone who will not stand for their arrogance, they climb down from their perch and behave,” she wrote. “They respect character when they meet it, and if more people had shown firmness to Hitler’s handyman Papen and his acolytes in small every day contacts, as well as in big affairs of state, the Nazi growth could have been slowed up.”

— Erik Larson

216. “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

217. “The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.”

— Erik Larson

218. “The city seemed untroubled by the war. Broadway – “the Great White Way,” so dubbed for its bright electric lighting – came brilliantly alight and alive each night, as always, although now with unexpected competition. A number of restaurants had begun providing lavish entertainment along with meals, even though they lacked theater licenses. The city was threatening a crackdown on these maverick “cabarets.”

— Erik Larson

219. “Having seen it,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”

— Erik Larson

220. “German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In.”

— Erik Larson

221. “In Calumet a thousand ornate streetlamps stood in a swamp, where they did nothing but ignite the fog and summon auras of mosquitoes.”

— Erik Larson

222. “Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett also found it repellent. “It shouldn’t be allowed,” she insisted. “It makes play and sport of agonies, not to help people bear them, but to pander to the basest, crudest, most-to-be-wiped-out feelings of cruel violence.”

— Erik Larson

223. “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

224. “Long before the fair’s end, people began mourning its inevitable passage. Mary Hartwell Catherwood wrote, “What shall we do when this Wonderland is closed? – when it disappears – when the enchantment comes to an end?” One lady manager, Sallie Cotton of North Carolina, a mother of six children staying in Chicago for the summer, captured in her diary a common worry: that after seeing the fair, “everything will seem small and insignificant.”

— Erik Larson

225. “I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.”

— Erik Larson

226. “History is full of lessons about the redemption of Lost Causes.”

— Erik Larson

227. “In shelters, the danger posed by poison gas was a particular concern. People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use.”

— Erik Larson

228. “Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.”

— Erik Larson

229. “He cared little about whether they had expertise with airplanes. “They are all captains of industry, and industry is like theology,” Beaverbrook said. “If you know the rudiments of one faith you can grasp the meaning of another.”

— Erik Larson

230. “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

231. “It was a difficult ride for him. He had passed this way before, to bury John Root. The fair had begun with death, and now it had ended with death.”

— Erik Larson

232. “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

233. “He had only to assert the most commonplace thing and it sounded important and convincing.”

— Erik Larson

234. “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

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

— Erik Larson

236. “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.”

— Erik Larson

237. “Hitler, however, forbade him from being photographed while he smoked, fearing the influence such publicity might have on the morals of German youths.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

239. “The meeting did succeed, however, in searing into the minds of several French officers a singular image: that of Churchill, angered by the French failure to prepare his afternoon bath, bursting through a set of double doors wearing a red kimono and a white belt, exclaiming, “Uh ay ma bain?” – his French version of the question “Where is my bath?” One witness reported that in his fury he looked like “an angry Japanese genie.”

— Erik Larson

240. “Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England.”

— Erik Larson

241. “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

242. “One immense German bomb, a thirteen-foot, four-thousand-pounder named Satan, could destroy an entire city block.”

— Erik Larson

243. “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

244. “Britain’s civil defense experts, fearing a “knock-out blow,” predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. “It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared,” wrote one junior official.”

— Erik Larson

245. “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

246. “Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign called Gleichschaltung – meaning “Coordination” – to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.”

— Erik Larson

247. “Dunwoody had been one of General Hazen’s most ardent critics, objecting at every opportunity to Hazen’s investment in scientific research. He would turn up again years later, in Cuba, doing his best to obstruct the efforts of Cuban meteorologists to transmit warnings about the hurricane of 1900 as it advanced through the Caribbean.”

— Erik Larson

248. “The one firm rock on which everyone was willing to build for the last two years was the French army,” wrote Foreign Secretary Halifax in his diary, “and the Germans walked through it like they did through the Poles.”

— Erik Larson

249. “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

250. “Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people – men, women, and children – simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.”

— Erik Larson