Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Erik Larson

405. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

408. “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

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

— Erik Larson

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Erik Larson

422. “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

423. “Far from a clamor for war, there existed a widespread, if naive, belief that war of the kind that had convulsed Europe in past centuries had become obsolete – that the economies of nations were so closely connected with one another that even if a war were to begin, it would end quickly.”

— Erik Larson

424. “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.”

— Erik Larson

425. “Burnham’s frequent admonition: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Burnham.”

— Erik Larson

426. “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”

— Erik Larson

427. “Stanley Baldwin, then deputy prime minister, gave the House of Commons a forecast of what was to come: “I think it is well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” The only effective defense lay in offense, he said, “which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.”

— Erik Larson

428. “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

— Erik Larson

429. “In honor of the fair Kodak called the folding version of its popular model No. 4 box camera the Columbus. The photographs these new cameras created were fast becoming known as “snap-shots,” a term originally used by English hunters to describe a quick shot with a gun.”

— Erik Larson

430. “The frontier may indeed have closed at last, as Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in his history-making speech at the fair, but for that moment it stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear.”

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

432. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “I didn’t believe all her stories,” Martha wrote later. “I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical.” When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression.”

— Erik Larson

442. “He often carried a revolver – and often misplaced it, according to Inspector Thompson. From time to time, Thompson recalled, Churchill would abruptly brandish his revolver and, “roguishly and with delight,” exclaim: “You see, Thompson, they will never take me alive! I will get one or two before they can shoot me down.”

— Erik Larson

443. “After a few minutes, Churchill broke the silence, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The remark had such power that Ismay quoted it to his wife after returning home. He had no idea that Churchill would soon deploy the line in one of his most famous speeches.”

— Erik Larson

444. “Depending on one’s point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening.”

— Erik Larson

445. “He told Hitler, “There is evident injustice in the French attitude; but defeat in war is always followed by injustice.” He raised the example of the aftermath of the American Civil War and the North’s “terrible” treatment of the South.”

— Erik Larson

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Erik Larson