Top 60 Frederick Forsyth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Vive la mort, vive la guerre, vive le sacre mercenaire.”

— Frederick Forsyth

2. “To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods.”

— Frederick Forsyth

3. “The stubbornness of a weak man should never be underestimated. The weak tend to be very stubborn when they’ve decided on something.”

— Frederick Forsyth

4. “One of the aspects of the genius of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that, although a convinced Democrat, he was quite prepared to use talent wherever he found it.”

— Frederick Forsyth

5. “It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.”

— Frederick Forsyth

6. “Shukran, sayidi, shukran.”

— Frederick Forsyth

7. “There is a French adage, “To understand everything is to forgive everything.” When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.”

— Frederick Forsyth

8. “There is an aphorism that you cannot buy the loyalty of an Afghan, but you can always rent it.”

— Frederick Forsyth

9. “Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it.”

— Frederick Forsyth

10. “On Foreign Secretary Robin Cook: If a man cannot keep a measly affair secret, what is he doing in charge of the Intelligence Service?”

— Frederick Forsyth

11. “When it came to evil, to tolerate was to accommodate, to accommodate was to appease, and to appease was to concede defeat.”

— Frederick Forsyth

12. “When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive.”

— Frederick Forsyth

13. “The United Nations had created a military “peacekeeping” force – the usual lunacy of sending a force to keep the peace where there was no peace to keep, then forbidding them to create the peace, ordering them instead to watch the slaughter without interfering.”

— Frederick Forsyth

14. “In the 66 years that I have been alive, there has not been one hour, of one day, of one month, of one year, when there has not been a threat aimed at us.”

— Frederick Forsyth

15. “As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy.”

— Frederick Forsyth

16. “A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it.”

— Frederick Forsyth

17. “He said that it was not his job to ensure that his soldiers died for their country. It was his job to make sure the other poor bastards died for theirs. Understand?”

— Frederick Forsyth

18. “There are several ways of making quick money but in the general list, writing a novel rates well below robbing a bank.”

— Frederick Forsyth

19. “The hatred of your country is not because it attacks theirs; it is because it keeps theirs safe. Never seek popularity. You can have supremacy or be loved but never both. What is felt toward you is ten percent genuine disagreement and ninety percent envy. Never forget two things! No man can ever forgive his protector. There is no loathing that any man harbors more intense than that toward his benefactor.”

— Frederick Forsyth

20. “The British have always coped without becoming a dictatorship.”

— Frederick Forsyth

21. “I have spent twenty years trying to understand the look in her eyes. Was it love or hatred, contempt or pity, bewilderment or understanding? I shall never know.”

— Frederick Forsyth

22. “The thing about wings is that they are yours and yours alone. You cannot inherit them from an indulgent father; you cannot buy them in Savile Row; you cannot win them in a lucky draw; you cannot marry them along with a pretty girl; you cannot steal them on a shoplifting spree. You cannot even earn them in a team event. You fight and you struggle, you study and you learn, you practice and you persevere, and finally you do it alone, high above the clouds, in a single-seater.”

— Frederick Forsyth

23. “It is strange how people always speak quietly in the darkness before dawn.”

— Frederick Forsyth

24. “The man in gray decided to take the Glen Suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded.”

— Frederick Forsyth

25. “Yevgeni Krilov knew he was in a room with the richest man in Russia, possibly the world. No one did a ruble’s worth of business in Russia without paying a percentage fee to the supreme boss, albeit through a complex network of shell companies and front men.”

— Frederick Forsyth

26. “Moonlight turns even the most civilised man into a primitive.”

— Frederick Forsyth

27. “I’m very sceptical about some of the excesses that I regard the Milibands of this world are leading towards. When you think about it, it’s all been incredibly rapid – a year, a year and a half. And it’s not a concern: it’s an obsession. It’s something very close to hysteria.”

— Frederick Forsyth

28. “The natives who saw him walking alone, and later brought him back to the town for burial, said he was whistling when he went. Being simple peasants, growers of yams and cassava, they did not know what the whistling was. It was a tune called “Spanish Harlem.”

— Frederick Forsyth

29. “The exam markers must have been somewhat bewildered to be told that when the Armada appeared, Francis Drake was playing with his balls.”

— Frederick Forsyth

30. “With terrorists, whether al-Fatah or Black September or the new, supposedly religious breed, the rage and the hatred come first.”

— Frederick Forsyth

31. “They returned. The Night Wolves came back the following night, and they were armed to the teeth. They thought they were taking on an undefended target. Their mission was to invade an old if sprawling house and eliminate a sleeping teenager in one of the bedrooms. Anyone else on that floor would also have to be taken down.”

— Frederick Forsyth

32. “The parents had tried to shelter their sons from the breakdown of the relationship between them, but it had become harder and harder, up till the point of impossibility.”

— Frederick Forsyth

33. “A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it. In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting but never joining. In short, an outsider.”

— Frederick Forsyth

34. “Kuwait was always historically part of Iraq. Like Nehru invading Portuguese Goa.”

— Frederick Forsyth

35. “That is why I believe that this coterie of vain mandarins and cowardly politicians stained the honor of my country forever, and I will never forgive them.”

— Frederick Forsyth

36. “The technique of beaming a ray on to window glass and reading from the vibrations the conversation going on inside had been used against the American embassy in Moscow in the Cold War and required the reconstruction of the entire building.”

— Frederick Forsyth

37. “Yessir. A crutch, like one-legged men always have.”

— Frederick Forsyth

38. “Along the wide straight road he pushed the car well over eighty miles an hour and kept the tachometre needle flickering just below the start of the red band.”

— Frederick Forsyth

39. “Oh, I will go back to Century House and start again. And go back each night to my small flat and listen to my music and eat my baked beans. And you will go back to Nikki, my friend, and hold her very tight, and write your books and forget all this.”

— Frederick Forsyth

40. “The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal.”

— Frederick Forsyth

41. “The Internet offers authors and their readers a new diversity of opportunities and freedom.”

— Frederick Forsyth

42. “The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective guilt theory.”

— Frederick Forsyth

43. “Anything else from the fertile mind of...”

— Frederick Forsyth

44. “But I seem to recall the teachings of Marx and Lenin are very firm on one point: that while the pursuit of the world rule of Marxism-Leninism must be pursued at every stage by every means, its progress should not be endangered by the incurring of foolish risks.”

— Frederick Forsyth

45. “But the words did not come. They never do, when one needs them.”

— Frederick Forsyth

46. “But the up-front reason is that he was reclaiming rightful Iraqi territory. Look, it happens all over the world. India took Goa, China took Tibet, Indonesia has taken East Timor. Argentina tried for the Falklands. Each time, the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory. It’s very popular with the home crowd, you know.”

— Frederick Forsyth

47. “You must forgive them, my child. Forgiveness is a part of penitence.”

— Frederick Forsyth

48. “America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can. They don’t matter to him.”

— Frederick Forsyth

49. “There were discrepancies. Sometimes.”

— Frederick Forsyth

50. “In the cavity were two handguns with ammunition clips.”

— Frederick Forsyth