Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain’s Ambassador Phipps would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. Phipps wrote, “The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a Borgia envious.”

— Erik Larson

253. “It is,” she wrote, “an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts.”

— Erik Larson

254. “Churchill himself found it all thrilling. “After all,” he told an interviewer with the Chicago Daily News later that week, “what more glorious thing can a spirited young man experience than meeting an opponent at four hundred miles an hour, with twelve or fifteen hundred horse power in his hands and unlimited offensive power? It is the most splendid form of hunting conceivable.”

— Erik Larson

255. “Later, Dodd wrote a description of Hitler in his diary. “He is romantic-minded and half-informed about great historical events and men in Germany.” He had a “semi-criminal” record. “He has definitely said on a number of occasions that a people survives by fighting and dies as a consequence of peaceful policies. His influence is and has been wholly belligerent.”

— Erik Larson

256. “Mackworth turned to Conner and said, “I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair.” “So did I,” Conner replied, “but I’ve learnt a devil of a lot in the last five minutes.”

— Erik Larson

257. “Flanagan and Allen: Bang, bang, bang, bang goes the farmer’s gun, Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run, run.”

— Erik Larson

258. “The man condemned for having ‘wheels in his head’ had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance.”

— Erik Larson

259. “Whether out of professional pique or some instinct of fear, the ship’s mascot – a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner’s predecessor – fled the ship that night, for points unknown.”

— Erik Larson

260. “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

261. “One of the most persistent problems of the day was “offensive feet,” caused by the prevailing habit of washing feet only once a week. To combat this, Hollingsworth wrote, “Take one part muriatic acid to ten parts of water; rub the feet every night with this mixture before retiring to bed.” To rid your mouth of the odor of onions, drink strong coffee.”

— Erik Larson

262. “All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones.”

— Erik Larson

263. “One line stood out with particular clarity: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

— Erik Larson

264. “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. – DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy: Canto I.”

— Erik Larson

265. “Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America’s awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune.”

— Erik Larson

266. “Recognizing that confidence and fearlessness were attitudes that could be adopted and taught by example, Churchill issued a directive to all ministers to put on a strong, positive front.”

— Erik Larson

267. “The official burdens on your shoulders are indeed heavy. I write to tell you how deeply I sympathize with you in having to bear this new burden of personal loss and sorrow.”

— Erik Larson

268. “Sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come.”

— Erik Larson

269. “In which building is the pope?” one woman asked. She was overheard by writer Teresa Dean, who wrote a daily column from the fair. “The pope is not here, madame,” the guard said. “Where is he?” “In Italy, Europe, madame.” The woman frowned. “Which way is that?” Convinced now that the woman was joking, the guard cheerfully quipped, “Three blocks under the lagoon.” She said, “How do I get there?”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

276. “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

277. “In the glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast’s card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

279. “But no matter how far Germany advanced or how much more territory it seized, Hitler would not prevail. The might of the British Empire – “nay, in a certain sense, the whole English-speaking world” – was on his trail, “bearing with them the swords of justice.”

— Erik Larson

280. “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

281. “In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. “Do you hear that?” he whispered. “Isn’t it wonderful? That’s what I call music.”

— Erik Larson

282. “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

283. “All the young are in the net,” he wrote, “anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed till they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.”

— Erik Larson

284. “Chamberlain, borrowing words used by Oliver Cromwell in 1653: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”

— Erik Larson

285. “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

286. “It was conceived out of hubris and anxiety, at a time – 1903 – when Britain feared it was losing the race for dominance of the passenger-ship industry.”

— Erik Larson

287. “I have examined the laws of the United States carefully and I do not find any law which says that a white man shall be punished for killing a Chinaman.”

— Erik Larson

288. “Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously,” wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish writer. “Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities.” Although.”

— Erik Larson

289. “Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.”

— Erik Larson

290. “I have never liked Americans, except odd ones. In the mass I have always thought them dreadful!”

— Erik Larson

291. “Torpedoes were expensive, and heavy. Each cost up to $ 5,000 – over $ 100,000 today – and weighed over three thousand pounds, twice the weight of a Ford Model T.”

— Erik Larson

292. “They have such confidence,” he said. “It is a grave responsibility.”

— Erik Larson

293. “My darling atheist,” she recalled telling him, “why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ?” He laughed. “This isn’t for Christians or for Christ, liebes Kind,” he said, “only for pagans like you and me. Anyway, it is very beautiful.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

295. “My between-books strategy was reading voraciously and on a whim.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

297. “She saw Hitler as “a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin.” Like many others in America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him lasting very long or being taken seriously.”

— Erik Larson

298. “During heavy rains, river water flowed in a greasy plume far out into Lake Michigan, to the towers that marked the intake pipes for the city’s drinking water.”

— Erik Larson

299. “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

300. “It was as if a load had suddenly been lifted from the German soul. The sense of relief could almost be felt in the air. Papen had put into words what thousands upon thousands of his countrymen had locked up in their hearts for fear of the awful penalties of speech.”

— Erik Larson