Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “The fair alone consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago.”

— Erik Larson

354. “She was one of America’s few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead.”

— Erik Larson

355. “Later, a passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.”

— Erik Larson

356. “You don’t pay much attention to the construction of ships?” “No, as long as they float; if they sink, I get out.”

— Erik Larson

357. “You know my dislike for saying ‘good-bye’ and were prepared to find that I had skipped this morning. To say that i was sorry to leave you all is to put it only one half as strongly as I feel.”

— Erik Larson

358. “One cannot possibly get accurate bombing on a selected target in this way.”

— Erik Larson

359. “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

360. “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

361. “Murder was a fascination as always.”

— Erik Larson

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “Hitler’s cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps.”

— Erik Larson

366. “There were so many items on the menu that Cunard felt obliged to print a separate sheet with suggested combinations, lest one starve from befuddlement.”

— Erik Larson

367. “Klemperer detected a certain “hysteria of language” in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation – “This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!” – and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, “copied from American cinema and thrillers,” that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In.”

— Erik Larson

368. “If some of what follows challenges what you have come to believe about Churchill and this era, may I just say that history is a lively abode, full of surprises.”

— Erik Larson

369. “I don’t see how in the course of having to make endless decisions one can avoid some mistakes.”

— Erik Larson

370. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Erik Larson

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Erik Larson

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Erik Larson

400. “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