Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens. Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In.”

— Erik Larson

352. “His overall appearance was striking, that of a damaged Ray Milland – a “cruel, broken beauty,” as Martha put.”

— Erik Larson

353. “Round My House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and War, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Wilson.”

— Erik Larson

354. “A ghostly virga of ice followed it through the night.”

— Erik Larson

355. “Berlin, moreover, was not yet the supercharged outpost it would become within the year. There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler’s government could not possibly endure. Germany’s military power was limited – its army, the Reichswehr, had only one hundred thousand men, no match for the military forces of neighboring France, let alone the combined might of France, England, Poland, and the Soviet Union.”

— Erik Larson

356. “Dodd seemed unaware that he might be conjuring forces that could endanger his career. Rather he delighted in pricking the clubby sensibilities of his opponents. With clear satisfaction he told his wife, “Their chief protector” – presumably he meant Phillips or Welles – “is not a little disturbed. If he attacks it certainly is not in the open.”

— Erik Larson

357. “Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks.”

— Erik Larson

358. “There are some things I must try to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.”

— Erik Larson

359. “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.”

— Erik Larson

360. “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

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

— Erik Larson

362. “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

363. “Here, as in other speeches, Churchill demonstrated a striking trait: his knack for making people feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous.”

— Erik Larson

364. “Hindenburg – known widely as the Old Gentleman – remained the last counterbalance to Hitler’s power and several days before Dodd’s departure had made a public declaration of displeasure at Hitler’s attempts to suppress the Protestant Church.”

— Erik Larson

365. “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

366. “She loved “their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life.”

— Erik Larson

367. “With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come.”

— Erik Larson

368. “He disliked the social obligations of the captaincy.”

— Erik Larson

369. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.”

— Erik Larson

370. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.” That word: television. In 1900.”

— Erik Larson

371. “All he asked of life was the best of everything.”

— Erik Larson

372. “The Fringes of Power; the work.”

— Erik Larson

373. “As labor strife increased and the economy faltered, the general level of violence rose.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Erik Larson

379. “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

380. “He recognized that the systemic malaise that caused it was a consequence in part of his own refusal over the years to limit his courtship of the finest wines, foods, and cigars.”

— Erik Larson

381. “Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.”

— Erik Larson

382. “Three hours into the voyage Kendall saw two of his passengers lingering by a lifeboat. He knew them to be the Robinsons, father and son, returning to America.”

— Erik Larson

383. “Despite the blackout, theaters were full, there were plenty of nightclubs for late dancing after restaurants closed, and many people still gave dinner parties, often organized round a son on leave.”

— Erik Larson

384. “THE SUBMARINE as a weapon had come a long way by this time, certainly to the point where it killed its own crews only rarely.”

— Erik Larson

385. “He was a loner and intellectually intolerant.”

— Erik Larson

386. “During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.”

— Erik Larson

387. “Fires were still raging all over the place; some of the larger buildings were mere skeletons, and many of the smaller houses had been reduced to piles of rubble.” He was struck in particular by the sight of paper Union Jacks planted in mounds of shattered lumber and brick. These, he wrote, “brought a lump to one’s throat.”

— Erik Larson

388. “By his own careful measure, he consumed up to two hundred grams of sugar a day, equivalent to forty-eight teaspoons.”

— Erik Larson

389. “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

390. “Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem.”

— Erik Larson

391. “In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall.”

— Erik Larson

392. “The becomingness of everything that may be seen as a modestly contributive part of a grand whole.”

— Erik Larson

393. “What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate – or even downright dangerous?” To Battersby, it typified “the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill” – his ability to transform “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.”

— Erik Larson

394. “A woman who may report on a neighbor for disloyalty and jeopardize his life, even cause his death, takes her big kindly-looking dog in the Tiergarten for a walk. She talks to him and coddles him as she sits on a bench and he attends to the requirements of nature.”

— Erik Larson

395. “On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed.”

— Erik Larson

396. “Another raid followed on January 31, during which nine airships flew as far as Liverpool, along the way sending terrifying shadows scudding across the landscape of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.”

— Erik Larson

397. “The rest, with faces contorted from the strain of trying to listen, saw distant men gesturing wildly into the sound-killing miasma of whispers, coughs and creaking shoe leather.”

— Erik Larson

398. “The delay you are causing us by not forwarding scale drawings is embarrassing in the extreme.”

— Erik Larson

399. “No other British city experienced such losses, but throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured. Of the dead, 5,626 were children.”

— Erik Larson

400. “He sensed a rising “hysteria” among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief “that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.”

— Erik Larson