Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Nor could one have imagined that such a terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern times.” Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger. Even the army had stood by, despite the murder of two of its generals.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

403. “Mayor Harrison warned that the ranks of the unemployed had swollen to an alarming degree. “If Congress does not give us money we will have riots that will shake this country,” he said. Two weeks later workers scuffled with police outside City Hall. It was a minor confrontation, but the Tribune called it a riot.”

— Erik Larson

404. “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

405. “It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

407. “Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, described as a “happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

409. “Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.”

— Erik Larson

410. “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

411. “He died angry,” Chalmers said, “because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.”

— Erik Larson

412. “He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds.”

— Erik Larson

413. “Edith wrote later, “This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ’turn a corner and meet your fate.”

— Erik Larson

414. “With the physique of a bank safe, he was the embodiment of quiet strength.”

— Erik Larson

415. “I was inclined to think him Jewish,” she wrote; she “considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.”

— Erik Larson

416. “Vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be felt much less if you do not lie with your head against the wall.”

— Erik Larson

417. “All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.”

— Erik Larson

418. “The Admiralty was well aware the Lusitania would soon traverse these same waters but made no effort to provide specifics of the night’s events directly to Captain Turner.”

— Erik Larson

419. “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

420. “You know, of course,” Dodd said, “that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life.”

— Erik Larson

421. “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

422. “As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families.”

— Erik Larson

423. “He wrote, “It is so humiliating to me to shake hands with known and confessed murderers.”

— Erik Larson

424. “Let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind. – Grover Cleveland.”

— Erik Larson

425. “From the start, Churchill and Fisher resolved to keep the operation so secret that only they and a few other Admiralty officials would ever know it existed.”

— Erik Larson

426. “These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.”

— Erik Larson

427. “In losing her he lost not merely his main source of companionship but also his primary adviser, whose observations he had found so useful in helping shape his own thinking.”

— Erik Larson

428. “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

429. “Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.”

— Erik Larson

430. “But far more than France was at stake, he added. He raised the specter of Britain, too, succumbing to Hitler’s influence and warned that a new and pro-German government might then replace his own. “If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.”

— Erik Larson

431. “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

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

— Erik Larson

433. “It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”

— Erik Larson

434. “Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love.”

— Erik Larson

435. “Time lost can never be recovered,” he said, “and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”

— Erik Larson

436. “Dodd’s main reason for wanting to see Dieckhoff was to express his dismay at having been made to seem naive by Goebbels’s Jews-as-syphilis speech after all he had done to quiet Jewish protests in America.”

— Erik Larson

437. “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

438. “The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening.”

— Erik Larson

439. “For those passengers who did feel unsettled by the German warning, Cunard offered comforting words. Wrote passenger Ambrose B. Cross, “From the very first the ship’s people asseverated that we ran no danger, that we should run right away from any submarine, or ram her, and so on, so that the idea came to be regarded as a mild joke for lunch and dinner tables.”

— Erik Larson

440. “A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9 – U-9, for short – commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.”

— Erik Larson

441. “These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.”

— Erik Larson

442. “What most likely caused the second event was the rupture of a main steam line, carrying steam under extreme pressure. This was Turner’s theory from the beginning.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

444. “The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, “The election here is a farce.” Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,154 of 2,242 prisoners – 96 percent – voted in favor of Hitler’s government. On.”

— Erik Larson

445. “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

446. “One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.”

— Erik Larson

447. “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

448. “His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.”

— Erik Larson

449. “Her gayety seemed like jewels on a skull.”

— Erik Larson

450. “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