Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “The Death of Boris,’ by Mussorgsky?”

— Erik Larson

302. “We are all well and satisfied with the amount and variety of work our good fortune has given us to do.”

— Erik Larson

303. “Night is the magician of the fair.”

— Erik Larson

304. “William Manchester and Paul Reid’s Defender of the Realm, Roy Jenkins’s Churchill, and Martin Gilbert’s Finest Hour – but then to plunge.”

— Erik Larson

305. “A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting. J. M. Barrie “Dedication” Peter Pan 1904.”

— Erik Larson

306. “The ministry’s array of “secret transmitters,” masquerading as English radio stations but based in Germany, were now to be deployed, “to arouse alarm and fear among the British people.” They were to take pains to disguise their German origins, even to the point of starting broadcasts with criticism of the Nazi Party, and fill their reports.”

— Erik Larson

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Erik Larson

310. “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

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

— Erik Larson

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Erik Larson

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Erik Larson

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an “area of war” in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning.”

— Erik Larson

327. “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

328. “I had no delusions about Hitler when I was appointed to my post in Berlin,” he answered. “But I had at least hoped to find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards.”

— Erik Larson

329. “She and a friend joked about what to do if the ship were attacked. “Our stewardess laughed,” Mrs. Lines recalled, “and said we would not go down, but up, as we were well loaded with munitions.”

— Erik Larson

330. “As a reminder to himself and anyone who visited his office in the shanty, Burnham posted a sign over his desk bearing a single word: RUSH.”

— Erik Larson

331. “My prophetic task would be twofold: to stand up to him, and to stand by him. To awaken his conscience, and to salve the pain this would cause him.”

— Erik Larson

332. “It’s a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one’s work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious.” Martha.”

— Erik Larson

333. “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

334. “He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke.”

— Erik Larson

335. “It’s not the bombs I’m scared of any more, it’s the weariness,” wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary – “trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I’d die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.”

— Erik Larson

336. “Indeed, anti-immigration sentiment in America would remain strong into 1938, when a Fortune poll reported that some two-thirds of those surveyed favored keeping refugees out of the country.”

— Erik Larson

337. “The decor of the house was by now legendary, and was fast becoming the model for a style of country home decor that emphasized color, comfort, and lack of formality. Its popularity prompted Mrs. Tree to create a home-design firm around the concept. Her future business partner would later describe her aesthetic as one of “pleasing decay.”

— Erik Larson

338. “Mankind is in grave danger, but democratic governments seem not to know what to do. If they do nothing, Western civilization, religious, personal and economic freedom are in grave danger.”

— Erik Larson

339. “Only holders of a cipher “key” could divine the underlying text, but possessing the codebooks made the whole process of solving the messages far simpler. To exploit these treasures the Admiralty established Room 40.”

— Erik Larson

340. “They looked more like day laborers than seamen.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

342. “The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire.”

— Erik Larson

343. “Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party very considerably,” he wrote. “There is every evidence that they are becoming constantly more moderate.”

— Erik Larson

344. “But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.”

— Erik Larson

345. “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

346. “Turner, that day, was master of one of the great greyhounds of the North Atlantic – and looked the part.”

— Erik Larson

347. “Churchill was in bed, “looking just like a rather nice pig, clad in a silk vest.”

— Erik Larson

348. “If you worked to advance the interests of the machine, the machine paid you back.”

— Erik Larson

349. “He insisted on keeping a Bren light machine gun in the trunk of his car, having vowed on numerous occasions that if the Germans came for him, he would take as many as possible with him to the grave.”

— Erik Larson

350. “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