Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “By his own careful measure, he consumed up to two hundred grams of sugar a day, equivalent to forty-eight teaspoons.”

— Erik Larson

352. “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

353. “Winston had grave concerns, and that she regretted letting the romance progress to this point without expressing their doubts and fears. This was only partly true: In fact, Churchill, preoccupied with war matters, had few concerns about the engagement and was more than content to let Clementine manage the situation. Thus far that weekend, his main interests had.”

— Erik Larson

354. “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

355. “In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.”

— Erik Larson

356. “When the conversation turned to Germany’s persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could “to ameliorate Jewish sufferings” but added a caveat: “the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.” In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany’s Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd.”

— Erik Larson

357. “One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans.”

— Erik Larson

358. “At Randolph-Macon, Dodd promptly got himself into hot water. In 1902 he published an article in the Nation in which he attacked a successful campaign by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans to have Virginia ban a history textbook that the veterans deemed an affront to southern honor. Dodd charged that the veterans believed the only valid histories were those that held that the South “was altogether right in seceding from the Union.”

— Erik Larson

359. “Murder was a fascination as always.”

— Erik Larson

360. “Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts,” she wrote; “and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.”

— Erik Larson

361. “But fighter production lagged. England’s aircraft plants operated on a prewar schedule that did not take into account the new reality of having a hostile force based just across the channel. Production, though increasing, was suppressed by the fusty practices of a peacetime bureaucracy only now awakening to the realities of total war. Shortages of parts and materials disrupted production.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Erik Larson

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Erik Larson

372. “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

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

— Erik Larson

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Erik Larson

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Erik Larson

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Erik Larson

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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