Top 500 Erik Larson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening.”

— Erik Larson

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Erik Larson

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

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

— Erik Larson

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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.” Fromm.”

— Erik Larson

432. “Deploying flattery leavened with irony, he began:.”

— Erik Larson

433. “His demand for fine things, especially those rendered in gold, was fed as well by a kind of institutional larceny.”

— Erik Larson

434. “Churchill saw the relationship in succinct terms. “Some take drugs,” he said. “I take Max.”

— Erik Larson

435. “Speed Bonnie Boat.”

— Erik Larson

436. “After noting that Germany’s submarine campaign had sharply reduced traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman: “For our part, we want the traffic – the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”

— Erik Larson

437. “In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.”

— Erik Larson

438. “If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years.”

— Erik Larson

439. “At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”

— Erik Larson

440. “It is not given to human beings – happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable – to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.”

— Erik Larson

441. “Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance.”

— Erik Larson

442. “With that as my guiding question, I set out on what became a lengthy journey through the vast and tangled forest of Churchill scholarship, a realm of giant volumes, distorted facts, and bizarre conspiracy theories, to try to find my personal Churchill. As I’ve discovered with prior books, when you look at the past through a fresh lens, you invariably see the world differently and find new material and insights even along well-trodden paths.”

— Erik Larson

443. “It could be done, because it had to be done.”

— Erik Larson

444. “Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

— Erik Larson

445. “At his own home, however, Goebbels found himself increasingly mired, not unhappily, in preparations for the holiday. He and his wife, Magda, had six children, all of whose names began with H: Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig, and Heidrun, the last just a month and a half old. The couple also had an older son, Harald, from Magda’s previous marriage. The children were excited, as was Magda, “who thinks about nothing but Christmas,” Goebbels wrote.”

— Erik Larson

446. “He added beneath his name a single word: “Finis.”

— Erik Larson

447. “I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.”

— Erik Larson

448. “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

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

— Erik Larson

450. “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