Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Erik Larson

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Gleichschaltung.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

213. “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

214. “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

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. “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

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

— Erik Larson

218. “He joined the crew of the Lake Champlain, a small steam-powered cargo ship owned by the Beaver Line of Canada but subsequently acquired by the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was its second officer in May 1901, when it became the first merchant vessel to be equipped with wireless.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

220. “Her gayety seemed like jewels on a skull.”

— Erik Larson

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Erik Larson

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Erik Larson

229. “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

230. “A boutonniere rested beside each plate. Everyone wore tuxedos. There was not a woman in sight.”

— Erik Larson

231. “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

232. “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

233. “Outside the sky was blank, the light pewter.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

235. “Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.”

— Erik Larson

236. “Some captains made no attempt to save the lives of merchant seamen; others went so far as to tow lifeboats towards land. One u-boat commander sent the captain of a torpedoed ship three bottles of wine to ease the long row ashore.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Erik Larson

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Erik Larson

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Erik Larson

248. “Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God’s province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

250. “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.”

— Erik Larson