Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.”

— Erik Larson

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

— Erik Larson

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.”

— Erik Larson

209. “Root was a notorious bon vivant, whom Louis Sullivan once described as “a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

211. “Isaac, at this point, still considered Moore a personal friend. It hurt him, no doubt, that Moore had distorted the story of his experience in the storm. Isaac had lost his wife and home, and had nearly lost a daughter, but Moore could not be bothered with the actual details.”

— Erik Larson

212. “He died angry,” Chalmers said, “because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.”

— Erik Larson

213. “French editor Octave Uzanne called it “that Gordian city, so excessive, so satanic.”27 Paul Lindau, an author and publisher, described it as “a gigantic peepshow of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point.”28.”

— Erik Larson

214. “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

215. “Tears come without any provocation.10 Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate.11 “Always be happy.” It did not work.”

— Erik Larson

216. “If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently.”

— Erik Larson

217. “She tooled around the city in an electric car.”

— Erik Larson

218. “After a few moment he reached for her wrist and felt her pulse fade to nothing, like the rumble of a receding train.”

— Erik Larson

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.”

— Erik Larson

224. “Time lost can never be recovered,” he said, “and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”

— Erik Larson

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Erik Larson

228. “Gleichschaltung.”

— Erik Larson

229. “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

230. “These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.”

— Erik Larson

231. “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

232. “With the physique of a bank safe, he was the embodiment of quiet strength.”

— Erik Larson

233. “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

234. “On a crystalline fall day you can almost hear the tinkle of fine crystal, the rustle of silk and wool, almost smell the expensive cigars.”

— Erik Larson

235. “There is nothing like the diversion of travel for one who is mentally fagged.”

— Erik Larson

236. “Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. “It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.”

— Erik Larson

237. “Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre,” Stead wrote, “but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream, silent as a city of the dead.”

— Erik Larson

238. “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

239. “This revitalization over drink and dinner was something of a pattern, as Lord Halifax’s wife, Dorothy, had noted in the past: Churchill would be “silent, grumpy and remote” at the start of a meal, she wrote. “But mellowed by champagne and good food he became a different man, and a delightful and amusing companion.” After Clementine once criticized his drinking, he told her, “Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

241. “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

242. “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

243. “His quest to create a powerful first impression was good showmanship, but it also exposed the aesthetic despot residing within.”

— Erik Larson

244. “A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9 – U-9, for short – commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.”

— Erik Larson

245. “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

246. “Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail – his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname “Forty-Page George.”

— Erik Larson

247. “She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression.”

— Erik Larson

248. “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

249. “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

250. “Vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be felt much less if you do not lie with your head against the wall.”

— Erik Larson