Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “A Woodrow Wilson no lo amedrentaba la guerra. Su obra de teatro favorita era Enrique V, de Shakespeare, y le gustaba la cita: “Si es pecado codiciar el honor, soy el mayor de todos los pecadores”.”

— Ken Follett

102. “This was the kind of thing Oswald Mosley and his British Fascists wanted – a country in which the rule of law was replaced by bullying and beating.”

— Ken Follett

103. “It was going to be difficult for Maud to get out of the house alone. Like all upper-class ladies, she was not supposed to go anywhere unescorted. Men pretended this was because they were so concerned to protect their women, but in truth it was a means of control. No doubt it would remain until women won the vote.”

— Ken Follett

104. “It was said that pilgrims should not spend too much time planning their journey, for they might learn of so many hazards that they would decide not to go.”

— Ken Follett

105. “So much hangs on the decisions of a small number of poorly educated people.” “That’s democracy.” Gus smiled. “A terrible way to run a country, but every other system is worse.”

— Ken Follett

106. “Woodrow Wilson was the first American president ever to leave the country during his term of office.”

— Ken Follett

107. “This was her destiny, and it was a fit and proper one. She was not unwilling, but she knew this was a fateful moment, and she had a sense of doors closing behind her and the path of her life being fixed irrevocably.”

— Ken Follett

108. “German women have to make hard choices. We’re paying for the easy choices German men made fifteen years ago. Men such as my father, who thought Hitler would be good for business, and Heinrich’s father, who voted for the Enabling Act. The sins of the fathers are visited on the daughters.”

— Ken Follett

109. “A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.”

— Ken Follett

110. “If God could not forgive lascivious priests, there would be very few clergy in heaven.”

— Ken Follett

111. “I must remember that, Philip thought: when you’re about to be turned down, go for a postponement. p314.”

— Ken Follett

112. “Whoever produced the first draft would need, in all fairness, to put in some of what the other side wanted alongside his own demands. His statement of the other side’s wishes then became an irreducible minimum, while all of his own demands were still up for negotiation. So the drafter always started at a disadvantage. Greg vowed to remember never to write the first draft.”

— Ken Follett

113. “I may yet go through anguish in hell for my sin. But if I had to live that time again I would do the same, to end Margery’s ordeal. I preferred to suffer myself than to know that her agony continued. Her well-being was more important to me than my own. I have learned, during the course of a long life, that that is the meaning of love.”

— Ken Follett

114. “The old men were still running the country. The politicians who had caused millions of deaths were now celebrating, as if they had done something wonderful.”

— Ken Follett

115. “Macke went to the door. He looked at the three women: the maid, the wife, and the daughter. “All this trouble,” he said, “for the sake of an eight-year-old moron. I will never understand you people.”

— Ken Follett

116. “He was seething inside with a new emotion. Nothing seemed very important anymore except the Princess. He was single-minded about her. He was enchanted. He was possessed. He was in love.”

— Ken Follett

117. “In the old days you wouldn’t discuss politics at all.” “If you don’t take an interest, then what happens is your fault.”

— Ken Follett

118. “Brave words came easily in the dark. Daylight might tell a different story.”

— Ken Follett

119. “I like reading history, and actually most authors enjoy the research part because it is, after all, easier than writing.”

— Ken Follett

120. “He had been granted his life’s wish-but conditionally.”

— Ken Follett

121. “Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.”

— Ken Follett

122. “But everyone had to die, and Father had given his life for the sake of a better world. If more Germans had had his courage the Nazis would not have triumphed. She wanted to do all the things he had done: to raise her children well, to make a difference to her country’s politics, to love and be loved. Most of all, when she died, she wanted her children to be able to say, as she said of her father, that her life had meant something, and that the world was a better place for it.”

— Ken Follett

123. “It was the most romantic plane ever made.”

— Ken Follett

124. “James Bond is quite serious about his drinks and clothing and cigarettes and food and all that sort of thing. There is nothing wry or amused about James Bond.”

— Ken Follett

125. “In both cases, weakness and scruples had defeated strength and ruthlessness.”

— Ken Follett

126. “Sabe que no es posible hacerlo todo, que hay que elegir las batallas que pueden ganarse.”

— Ken Follett

127. “Arrogance was the vice of good leaders. – Prior Philip.”

— Ken Follett

128. “She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic.”

— Ken Follett

129. “She had believed that love was something she could bestow upon whomever she liked, and that her main responsibility was to choose cleverly.”

— Ken Follett

130. “But Wilson was an idealist who believed that the force of righteousness would overcome all obstacles. He underestimated the need to flatter, cajole, and seduce.”

— Ken Follett

131. “We move by inches, not miles,’ said Gus Dewar with a smile. ‘That’s politics.”

— Ken Follett

132. “I remember seeing a Nazi poster,” she went on. It was this memory that had triggered her dreadful thought. “There was a picture of a male nurse and a mentally handicapped man. The text said something like: ‘Sixty thousand reichsmarks is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the people’s community during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money too!’ It was an advertisement for a magazine, I think.”

— Ken Follett

133. “Don’t you know that if you deny the truth about yourself you lose your soul?”

— Ken Follett

134. “If I’ve learned one thing in Spain, it’s that we have to fight the Communists just as hard as the Fascists. They’re both evil.”

— Ken Follett

135. “Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced.”

— Ken Follett

136. “He had realized that she was all the joy in his world. If the weather was fine, he wanted to walk in the sunshine with her; if he saw something beautiful, he wanted to show it to her; if he heard something funny, his first thought was to tell her, and see her smile. His work gave him pleasure, especially when he came up with clever solutions to intractable problems; but it was a cold, cerebral satisfaction, and he knew that his life would be a long winter without Caris.”

— Ken Follett

137. “A child will always be what he is, she thought, and not what you want him to be.”

— Ken Follett

138. “The queen did not know what to say about a man whose virtue was that he did not beat his wife. “He was even kind to his ponies,” Mrs. Dai added. “I’m sure he was,” said the queen, back on familiar ground.”

— Ken Follett

139. “Most spies were amateurs: frustrated revolutionaries of the left or right, people who wanted the imaginary glamour of espionage, greedy men or lovesick women or blackmail victims. The few professionals were very dangerous indeed; they were not merciful men.”

— Ken Follett

140. “The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt.”

— Ken Follett

141. “People think they’re being saved from a Bolshevik revolution,” Frunze said. “The Nazi press has them convinced that the Communists were about to launch a campaign of murder, arson, and poison in every town and village.”

— Ken Follett

142. “There’s no rule that says public opinion has to be consistent.”

— Ken Follett

143. “The boundary between philosophy and fiction is not as clear cut as you may think and the two definitely interact...”

— Ken Follett

144. “Philip believed that caring for people was the service of God. That was what salvation was about.”

— Ken Follett

145. “Most people in Kingsbridge could talk only about agriculture and adultery, neither of which interested her.”

— Ken Follett

146. “Fitz probably had half a dozen bastards around the world, but Ethel’s was the only one he knew of for sure.”

— Ken Follett

147. “She had believed that love was something she could bestow upon whomever she liked, and that her main responsibility was to choose cleverly. Now she knew that was all wrong. Cleverness had nothing to do with it, and she had no choice. Love was an earthquake.”

— Ken Follett

148. “He wondered if he really was capable of it. Then he thought what a thrill it would be to create something from nothing; to see, one day in the future, a new church here where now there was nothing but rubble, and to say: I made this.”

— Ken Follett

149. “Until August the Luftwaffe had raided only ports and airfields. Fitz had explained, in an unusually candid moment, that the British were not so scrupulous: the government had approved bombing of targets in German cities back in May, and all through June and July the RAF had dropped bombs on women and children in their homes. The German public had been enraged by this and demanded retaliation. The Blitz was the result.”

— Ken Follett

150. “If you don’t take an interest, then what happens is your fault.”

— Ken Follett