Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Ken Follett

103. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

106. “In 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

108. “The heart is that kind of map. The self is in the middle and everything else is out of proportion. You draw the friends of your youth large, then later it’s impossible to rescale them when other more important people need to be added. Anyone who has done you wrong is shown too big, and so is anyone you loved.”

— Ken Follett

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “We’re all good when it suits us, he used to say: that doesn’t count. It’s when you want so badly to do something wrong – when you’re about to make a fortune from a dishonest deal, or kiss the lovely lips of your neighbor’s wife, or tell a lie to get yourself out of terrible trouble – that’s when you need the rules. Your integrity is like a sword, he would say: you shouldn’t wave it until you’re about to put it to the test.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Ken Follett

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Ken Follett

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Ken Follett

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Ken Follett

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “You don’t catch people’s religions the way you catch their fleas.”

— Ken Follett

138. “His aim was the glory of God, but the glory of Philip pleased him too.”

— Ken Follett

139. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

142. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

145. “Philip had always believed that hard work should be rewarded by good food.”

— Ken Follett

146. “People know the difference between right and wrong – and if they don’t, that’s what priests are for.”

— Ken Follett

147. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

150. “Monika answered for her father. Giving Walter a conspiratorial grin, she said: “Daddy used to say that if the tsar had been born to a different station in life, he might, with an effort, have become a competent postman.”

— Ken Follett