Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.”

— Ken Follett

52. “Her breasts had changed, too. He remembered when they had stuck out from her chest as if they were weightless, the nipples pointing up. Then, when she was pregnant, they had become even bigger, and the nipples had grown larger. Now they were lower and softer, and they swung delightfully from side to side when she walked. He had loved them through all their changes. He wondered what they would be like when she was old.”

— Ken Follett

53. “All birds and men are sure to die but songs may live forever.”

— Ken Follett

54. “Changing your beliefs with every change of monarch was called “policy,” and people who did it were “politicians.”

— Ken Follett

55. “What you’re doing is wrong,” he said. “I mean evil. To give up happiness like this is like throwing jewels into the ocean. It’s far worse than any sin.”

— Ken Follett

56. “Jack Reacher is a brilliant movie.”

— Ken Follett

57. “The CIA’s research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.”

— Ken Follett

58. “He had seen – clever, clever boy that he was – that she could not be won by wooing; and he had approached her sidelong, as a friend rather than a lover, meeting her in the woods and telling her stories and making her love him without her noticing.”

— Ken Follett

59. “Erik said: “But the Aryan race must be superior – we rule the world!” “Your Nazi friends don’t know any history,” Father said. “The Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids when Germans were living in caves. Arabs ruled the world in the Middle Ages – the Muslims were doing algebra when German princes could not write their own names. It’s nothing to do with race.”

— Ken Follett

60. “I imagined it. I wrote it. But I guess I never thought I’d see it.”

— Ken Follett

61. “I don’t think there’s any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.”

— Ken Follett

62. “I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.”

— Ken Follett

63. “The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt.”

— Ken Follett

64. “At last it faded away, and the mushroom cloud began to disperse. Greg heard Frank Oppenheimer say: “It worked.” Oppie said: “Yes, it worked.” The two brothers shook hands. And the world is still here, Greg thought. But it has been forever changed.”

— Ken Follett

65. “I believe that what I do becomes part of me,” she said. “When I’m brave and strong, and care for children and the sick and the poor, I become a better person. And when I’m cruel, or cowardly, or tell lies, or get drunk, I turn into someone less worthy, and I can’t respect myself. That’s the divine retribution I believe in.”

— Ken Follett

66. “Fascism is on the march,” Lloyd began. “And it is dangerously attractive. It gives false hope to the unemployed. It wears a spurious patriotism, as the Fascists themselves wear imitation military uniforms.”

— Ken Follett

67. “She looked at his young face, so full of concern and tenderness; and she remembered why she had run away from everyone else and sought solitude here. She yearned to kiss him, and she saw the answering longing in his eyes. Every fiber of her body told her to throw herself into his arms, but she knew what she had to do. She wanted to say, I love you like a thunderstorm, like a lion, like a helpless rage; but instead she said: “I think I’m going to marry Alfred.”

— Ken Follett

68. “It means telling the truth, keeping promises, and taking responsibility for your mistakes. It’s the same in business as it is in everyday life. It’s a matter of being what you claim to be, doing what you say you’ll do.”

— Ken Follett

69. “His mind was like a house he had spent his life furnishing.”

— Ken Follett

70. “She had always liked what Scarlett O’Hara said in Gone with the Wind: I’ll think about it tomorrow. Not anymore.”

— Ken Follett

71. “I adore you’ she said. ‘When you go, I’ll cry. But I’m not going to spoil today by being miserable about tomorrow.”

— Ken Follett

72. “There is no point in asking a man a question until you have established whether he has any reason to lie to you.”

— Ken Follett

73. “Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It’s the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice;.”

— Ken Follett

74. “Siempre es el momento propicio para hacer lo correcto.”

— Ken Follett

75. “Despite everything they say, they are not popular. And the longer they stay in government, the better people will get to know their wickedness.”

— Ken Follett

76. “Any fool can get into a fight, but a wise man knows how to stay out of them.”

— Ken Follett

77. “Around most of its coast the cliffs rise out of the cold sea without the courtesy of a beach. Angered by this rudeness the waves pound on the rock in impotent rage: a ten-thousand-year fit of bad temper that the island ignores with impunity.”

— Ken Follett

78. “Erik was one of those inadequate people who were so scared by life that they preferred to live under harsh authority, to be told what to do and what to think by a government that allowed no dissent. They were foolish and dangerous, but there were an awful lot of them.”

— Ken Follett

79. “Gwenda sighed. She did not know how to say what she felt. It was not just love. She thought about him all the time, and she did not know how she could live without him. She daydreamed about kidnapping him and locking him up in a hut deep in the forest so that he could never escape from her.”

— Ken Follett

80. “Human beings have the capacity to rise above mundane circumstances and touch the eternal.”

— Ken Follett

81. “War was grueling and oppressive and frustrating and uncomfortable, but one had friends. If peace brought back loneliness, Godliman thought he would not be able to live with it.”

— Ken Follett

82. “Handel’s “He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd,” a popular anthem with elaborate part singing that the congregation performed faultlessly. As hundreds of tenor voices soared across the.”

— Ken Follett

83. “The first casualty of a civil war was justice, Philip had realized.”

— Ken Follett

84. “Because all this stuff about military targets is absolute rubbish. There’s no point in bombing German factories, because they just rebuild them. So we’re targeting large areas of dense working-class housing. They can’t replace the workers so fast.” Lowther looked shocked. “That would mean it’s our policy to kill civilians.”

— Ken Follett

85. “Is it experimental?” “All medicine is experimental. All therapies work on some patients but not on others. You must listen to what I tell you: medicine offers no guarantees.”

— Ken Follett

86. “It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate, and the newspapers were always ready to supply that need. Maud knew the proprietor of the Mail, Lord Northcliffe. Like all great press men, he really believed the drivel he published. His talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.”

— Ken Follett

87. “There’s a saying: ‘If you owe a hundred dollars, the bank has you in its power; but if you owe a million dollars, you have the bank in your power.”

— Ken Follett

88. “Mankind is fallible, so we should not rely on our own reasoning. We cannot hope to understand the world – all we can do is stand amazed at God’s creation. True knowledge comes only from revelation. We should not question received wisdom.”

— Ken Follett

89. “Desperate men are dangerous. And I do know that the United States is not ready to go to war against Japan. Our navy isn’t ready and our air force isn’t ready.”

— Ken Follett

90. “He was the kind of man George had been fighting for a decade: an ugly, fat, foul-mouthed, stupid white racist.”

— Ken Follett

91. “I might not be a good socialist, any more than I’m a good Christian, but I am one.”

— Ken Follett

92. “Why was it, Lloyd wondered, that the people who wanted to destroy everything good about their country were the quickest to wave the national flag?”

— Ken Follett

93. “Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.”

— Ken Follett

94. “When things are simple, fewer mistakes are made. The most expensive part of a building is the mistakes.”

— Ken Follett

95. “The worst negotiator in the world is a man who believes he’s clever.”

— Ken Follett

96. “Trials rarely found men not guilty. The general view was that if a man were innocent he would not have got into trouble in the first place.”

— Ken Follett

97. “Just because someone asks you a question, don’t you think you have to answer.”

— Ken Follett

98. “A waiter appeared, and Gus said: “Bring coffee for my guests, please, and a plate of ham sandwiches.” He deliberately did not ask them what they wanted. He had seen Woodrow Wilson act like this with people he wanted to intimidate.”

— Ken Follett

99. “My favorite period is World War II, and I’m in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.”

— Ken Follett

100. “After the Battle of Midway it was clear that the Pacific war would be won by planes launched from ships. Both Japan and the United States began crash programs to build aircraft carriers as fast as possible. During 1943 and 1944, Japan produced seven of these huge, costly vessels. In the same period, the United States produced ninety.”

— Ken Follett