Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “If you’re going to have a fight, you might as well fight for what you really want.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

156. “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

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

— Ken Follett

158. “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

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

— Ken Follett

160. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Ken Follett

164. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Ken Follett

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Ken Follett

173. “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

174. “Excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility. – Cuthbert Whitehead.”

— Ken Follett

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

179. “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

180. “A person who breaks a promise diminishes herself. It’s like losing a finger. It’s worse than being paralyzed, which is merely physical. Someone whose promises are worthless has a disabled soul.”

— Ken Follett

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Ken Follett

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “A family of Jews were showing their tickets at the head of the gangplank. All Jews wanted to go to America, in Grigori’s experience. They had even more reason than he did. In Russia there were laws forbidding them to own land, to enter the civil service, to be army officers, and countless other prohibitions. They could not live where they liked, and there were quotas limiting the number who could go to universities. It was a miracle any of them made a living.”

— Ken Follett

195. “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

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

— Ken Follett

197. “Flares and small incendiary bombs began to fall as the car approached Kreuzberg. The neighborhood was a typical target for the RAF’s current strategy of killing as many civilian factory workers as possible. With staggering hypocrisy Churchill and Attlee were claiming they attacked only military targets, and civilian casualties were a regrettable side effect. Berliners knew better.”

— Ken Follett

198. “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

199. “Sir Edward Grey was a thin man with a face like a skull. He disliked foreigners and almost never traveled abroad: in British eyes, that made him the perfect foreign secretary. “Thank.”

— Ken Follett

200. “She now welcomed him to her bedroom, dressed in pretty nightwear, offering him her scented body as she had when they were first married. In the end she was a well-brought-up aristocratic woman and she knew what a wife was for.”

— Ken Follett