Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 7

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

— Ken Follett

202. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

205. “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

206. “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

207. “He did not share his father’s belief that the Germans were a superior type of human, but on the other hand he could see that German mastery of Europe would be no bad thing. The French had many brilliant talents – cooking, painting, fashion, wine – but they were not good at government. French officials saw themselves as some kind of aristocracy, and thought it was perfectly all right to.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

209. “As in every country, Walter thought gloomily, army officers were pressing their political masters to take the first steps to war. It.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

211. “Growing up is learning to deceive.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Ken Follett

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Ken Follett

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “International politics is like a glass. Aggressive moves by either side pour water in. The overflow is war.” Dimka.”

— Ken Follett

228. “No candidate is perfect’ said Lloyd. ‘It’s how you deal with your weaknesses that matters.”

— Ken Follett

229. “She nodded. “They’re counting again in California. Almost a million people voted, and the difference is about five thousand.” “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

230. “A woman’s life was a house of closed doors: she could not be an apprentice, she could not study at the university, she could not be a priest or a physician, or shoot a bow or fight with a sword, and she could not marry without submitting herself to the tyranny of her husband.”

— Ken Follett

231. “Feeling that everyone else was so much more powerful and sophisticated than he was, he had lost sight of his true values, suspended his critical faculties, and placed his trust in his superiors. His reward had been treachery. He.”

— Ken Follett

232. “It was amazing, Philip thought, how a clear case of injustice could come to seem evenly balanced when argued at the court.”

— Ken Follett

233. “Most of my stories have some basis in fact.”

— Ken Follett

234. “It’s our responsibility to make politics less rough – more honest, more rational, less violent. If we do not do that, we fail in our patriotic duty.”

— Ken Follett

235. “There will always be crashes. They are necessary to remind good and bad investors that risk is real.”

— Ken Follett

236. “The worst thing of all would be to disgrace himself. He was more afraid of that than of dying.”

— Ken Follett

237. “People change’. Weak women change to please men, Lili thought.”

— Ken Follett

238. “All his life he would cherish the memory of an endless caravan of camels alongside the railway line, the laden beasts plodding patiently through the snow, ignoring the twentieth century as it hurtled past them in a clash of iron and a shriek of steam.”

— Ken Follett

239. “Repress those who complain, rather than address their discontents.”

— Ken Follett

240. “Monks committed all the same sins that ordinary people did. He had just been shocked by the woman’s shamelessness. The sight of her nakedness remained with him, the way the hot heart of a candle flame, stared at for a few moments, would burn on behind closed eyelids.”

— Ken Follett

241. “There had been a wonderful atmosphere of liberation and camaraderie. The Russians hated it.”

— Ken Follett

242. “They were taught about democracy in London, not about tyranny in Cairo.”

— Ken Follett

243. “Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best.”

— Ken Follett

244. “He had been angry for years about the disgraceful way the priory was run, and now he had a chance to set all those things right himself. Suddenly he was not sure he could. It was not just a question of seeing what ought to be done and ordering that it should be so. People had to be persuaded, property had to be managed, money had to be found. It was a job for a wise head. The responsibility would be heavy.”

— Ken Follett

245. “Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.”

— Ken Follett

246. “Meanwhile the subject peoples of the Austrian Empire were starting to think they might rule themselves – which was why the Bosnian nationalist Gavrilo Princip had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.”

— Ken Follett

247. “Why did people manufacture trouble when there was already so much of it in the world?”

— Ken Follett

248. “Lenin’s idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.”

— Ken Follett

249. “Like all diplomats, Walter hated it when monarchs talked directly to each other, instead of through their ministers. Anything could happen then.”

— Ken Follett

250. “There had to be order. Grigori did not want to go back to the old days, of course. The tsar had given them bread queues, brutal police, and soldiers without boots. But there had to be freedom without chaos.”

— Ken Follett