Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “He had been granted his life’s wish-but conditionally.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

154. “But now he realized that, as a Jew, you could go anywhere in the world and always find someone to treat you like family.”

— Ken Follett

155. “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

156. “For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.”

— Ken Follett

157. “Fitz must not know in advance, for he would try to stop her. He might simply lock her in her room. He could even get her committed to a lunatic asylum. A wealthy upper-class man could have a female relative put away without much difficulty. All Fitz would have to do was to find two doctors willing to agree with him that she must be mad to want to marry a German.”

— Ken Follett

158. “I started writing stories in my spare time.”

— Ken Follett

159. “Chaperoning rules had relaxed since the outbreak of war. It was no longer scandalous for a single woman to go out unescorted in the daytime.”

— Ken Follett

160. “With the fascination of a condemned man watching the carpenter build the gallows.”

— Ken Follett

161. “He was nineteen years old, homeless and rootless, with no family and no purpose in life.”

— Ken Follett

162. “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

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

— Ken Follett

164. “Welsh chapelgoers automatically sang in four-part harmony, and when they were in the mood they could raise the roof. As he joined in, Lloyd felt this was the beating heart of Britain, here in this whitewashed chapel.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

166. “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

167. “Puedo hacer frente a cualquier cosa siempre que te tenga a mi lado.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

170. “Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me. Why? Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved.”

— Ken Follett

171. “There is a real connection between Philosopy and fiction.”

— Ken Follett

172. “You mean there isn’t an indisputable book that is the actual Word of God? Men argue about it and make a judgment?”

— Ken Follett

173. “Our government doesn’t necessarily agree with Wilson’s Fourteen Points.” Maud nodded. “I suppose we’re against point five, about colonial peoples having a say in their own government.” “Exactly. What about Rhodesia, and Barbados, and India? We can’t be expected to ask the natives’ permission before we civilize them. Americans are far too liberal. And we’re dead against point two, freedom of the seas in war and peace.”

— Ken Follett

174. “A man hates the person he has wronged, paradoxically. I think it’s because the victim is a perpetual reminder that he behaved shamefully.”

— Ken Follett

175. “Any man who needs to surround himself with loyal acolytes doesn’t really believe in himself,” he would say. “And if he doesn’t believe in himself, why should I?”

— Ken Follett

176. “They learned that Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and it came as a shock if they ever found out that Protestants did the same to Catholics whenever they got the chance.”

— Ken Follett

177. “If you’re going to have a fight, you might as well fight for what you really want.”

— Ken Follett

178. “She was wilful, maddening, quarrelsome and intolerant, but somehow these things were trifling: there was a passion inside her that burned like a candle in a lantern, and it lit up his life.”

— Ken Follett

179. “I will marry a man who is clever and thoughtful and who wants his wife to be more than just the most senior of his servants.”

— Ken Follett

180. “There was much talk about why the prime minister had brought back such a troublesome and unpredictable colleague, and the consensus was that he preferred to have Churchill inside the tent spitting out.”

— Ken Follett

181. “Aliena’s brother, Richard, sometimes reminded her of her father, with a look or a gesture, and that was when she felt a surge of affection.”

— Ken Follett

182. “There were more police than Fascists. From inside one of the buses, a uniformed constable gave him the Hitler salute. Lloyd was dismayed. If all these policemen sided with the Fascists, how could the counterdemonstrators resist them?”

— Ken Follett

183. “And that was the problem, George reflected bitterly. People hated disorder. Press coverage had blamed the Riders for stirring up trouble, not the segregationists with their baseball bats and their bombs. It drove him mad with frustration: did no one in America think about what was right?”

— Ken Follett

184. “No, thank you, it’s nothing serious.” A headache that was not serious was the usual euphemism for a menstrual period, and everyone accepted this without further comment.”

— Ken Follett

185. “A German attack on Russia’s ally France would, in reality, be defensive – but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.”

— Ken Follett

186. “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

187. “Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.”

— Ken Follett

188. “Don’t worry. We who are born poor have to use cunning to get what we want. Scruples are for the privileged.” She.”

— Ken Follett

189. “Are you dating anyone?’ ‘Sally Dasilva.’ ‘The actress. I saw a picture of the two of you, arriving at some premiere, but I didn’t know if it was serious.’ It was not very serious. ‘She’s in LA, and we both work a lot. But we get a weekend together once in a while.’ ‘By the.”

— Ken Follett

190. “There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.”

— Ken Follett

191. “If earls’ daughters were allowed to marry whom they please, we’d all be ruled by strolling minstrels and dark-eyed outlaws.”

— Ken Follett

192. “The truth is not arrived at by majority vote.”

— Ken Follett

193. “Growing up is learning to deceive.”

— Ken Follett

194. “For me the words should be like a pane of glass that you look through, not at.”

— Ken Follett

195. “Jesus is always with you, even down the pit.” At the time he had thought she was just telling him to behave well. But she had been wiser than that. Of course Jesus was with him. Jesus was everywhere. The darkness did not matter, nor the passage of time.”

— Ken Follett

196. “The fourth issue would go to the printer tomorrow. He was not so happy with this one: there was no big controversy. He put that out of his mind for the moment and.”

— Ken Follett

197. “Carla had never before realized how much she had been protected by politicians, newspapermen, and lawyers. Without them, she saw now, the government could do anything it liked, even kill people.”

— Ken Follett

198. “They wanted to look as if they had the right to close meetings and empty buildings, to burst into homes and offices and arrest people, to drag them to jails and camps and beat them up, interrogate and torture them, as.”

— Ken Follett

199. “Lowther looked shocked. “That would mean it’s our policy to kill civilians.” “Exactly.” “But the government assures us – ” “The government lies,” Boy said. “And the bomber crews know it. Many of them don’t give a damn, of course, but some feel bad. They believe that if we’re doing the right thing, then we should say so, and if we’re doing the wrong thing we should stop.”

— Ken Follett

200. “Sometimes Winston imagined he had devised a policy when all he had done was coin a phrase.”

— Ken Follett