Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “His aim was the glory of God, but the glory of Philip pleased him too.”

— Ken Follett

152. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

156. “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

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

— Ken Follett

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Ken Follett

167. “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

168. “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

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

— 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. “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

172. “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

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

— Ken Follett

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Ken Follett

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Ken Follett

183. “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

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

— Ken Follett

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Ken Follett

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Ken Follett

191. “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

192. “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

193. “One of the hardest things for me, now that I’m famous, is finding people who can read my stuff and give me an honest critique.”

— Ken Follett

194. “An evident principle runs through the whole program,” Wilson had said. “It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.” Tears had come to Gus’s eyes when he had read these words. “The people of the United States could act upon no other principle,” Wilson had said.”

— Ken Follett

195. “When Ethel said we should give everyone free education and free health care and unemployment insurance, I told her she was living in a dream world. But now look: everything she campaigned for has come to pass, and yet England is still England.”

— Ken Follett

196. “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

197. “After all, if you can’t kill a man in front of God’s face you probably shouldn’t kill him at all.”

— Ken Follett

198. “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

199. “It did not occur to them that a woman could be dangerous. How foolish they were.”

— Ken Follett

200. “For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.”

— Ken Follett