Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Ken Follett

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Ken Follett

158. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Ken Follett

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “They had just started their first scheduled air service. Planes went from Vienna to Kiev and back like railway trains. There would be a network of flights all over Europe after Germany won the war. And Walter and Maud would raise their children in a peaceful and well-ordered world.”

— Ken Follett

175. “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

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

— Ken Follett

177. “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

178. “After a certain point, most people, including editors, will tell you everything you do is great.”

— Ken Follett

179. “Everything is ultimately the Prime Minister’s fault’, said Lloyd. ‘That’s what it means to be the leader.”

— Ken Follett

180. “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

181. “America is ruled by laws, not mobs!”

— Ken Follett

182. “You can’t write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they’re called literary novels.”

— Ken Follett

183. “A white American can orbit the earth, but a black American can’t enter a restroom.”

— Ken Follett

184. “Barrow, who evidently had never seen an atlas, felt superior to Descartes, Rembrandt, and Beethoven.”

— Ken Follett

185. “Growing up is learning to deceive.”

— Ken Follett

186. “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

187. “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

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. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

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. “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

198. “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

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

— Ken Follett

200. “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