Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “He put on his coat and hat. Then he returned to the kitchen. He kissed his mother and embraced his father. “What’s this for?” said his father. “You’re only going to work.” “It’s just in case we never meet again,” Volodya said. Then he went out.”

— Ken Follett

204. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

207. “What about America? They believe in democracy. Surely they’ll sell guns to Spain?” “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But there’s a well-financed Catholic lobby, led by a millionaire called Joseph Kennedy, opposing any help to the Spanish government. And a Democratic president needs Catholic support. Roosevelt won’t do anything to jeopardize his New Deal.”

— Ken Follett

208. “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

209. “Los manifestantes pueden causar un gran impacto, pero al final son los gobiernos los que remodelan el mundo.”

— Ken Follett

210. “A very good editor is almost a collaborator.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

225. “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

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

— Ken Follett

227. “With faultless good manners they would lead the world to destruction.”

— Ken Follett

228. “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

229. “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

230. “It was an odd thing to do, to stand in a street in the hope of seeing someone who hardly knew him, but he did not want to move.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

232. “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

233. “We’re all good when it suits us, he used to say: that doesn’t count. It’s when you want so badly to do something wrong – when you’re about to make a fortune from a dishonest deal, or kiss the lovely lips of your neighbor’s wife, or tell a lie to get yourself out of terrible trouble – that’s when you need the rules. Your integrity is like a sword, he would say: you shouldn’t wave it until you’re about to put it to the test.”

— Ken Follett

234. “You didn’t ask for a priest.” “Whether I’ve been good or bad, I don’t think God will be fooled by a last-minute change of heart.”

— Ken Follett

235. “All the same he was depressed and bitter. Life never dealt him a winning hand.”

— Ken Follett

236. “But when you grab happiness you may let go of something more valuable – your integrity. – Hugh Pilaster.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

238. “When you’re about to be turned down, go for a postponement.”

— Ken Follett

239. “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

240. “The people of the East End did not want to overthrow the British government. On the contrary, they were deeply attached to their elections and their borough councils and their Houses of Parliament. They liked their system of government so much that they were determined to defend it against Fascism even if it would not defend itself.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

242. “The sight of them all made Caris marvel: each individual had a different life, every one of them rich and complex, with dramas in the past and challenges in the future, happy memories and secret sorrows, and a crowd of friends and enemies and loved ones.”

— Ken Follett

243. “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

244. “Men often told a fairy tale in which there was a division of labor in families, the man going out to earn money, the woman looking after home and children. Reality was different.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

246. “We’ll see, Grigori thought as he drifted off to sleep. Brave words came easily in the dark. Daylight might tell a different story.”

— Ken Follett

247. “The original eight cryptanalysts were supplemented, after Pearl Harbor, by some of the musicians from the band of the sunken battleship California. For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.”

— Ken Follett

248. “Even if you were taken out of school for want of money, Hugh. It’s no excuse for false values. The world is full of poor people who understand that love and friendship are more important than riches – Maisie Greenbourne.”

— Ken Follett

249. “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

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

— Ken Follett