Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Ken Follett

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Ken Follett

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

218. “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

219. “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

220. “Growing up is learning to deceive.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

225. “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

226. “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

227. “I wanted to be some kind of captain of industry. Then I wanted to be in advertising, and then I wanted to be a newspaper reporter.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Ken Follett

235. “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

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

— Ken Follett

237. “Protestors can have a big impact, but in the end it’s governments that reshape the world.”

— Ken Follett

238. “It’s hard to be a woman, she thought. You love your baby with all your heart and soul, and then one day he just leaves.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

240. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

243. “Any man who needs to surround himself with loyal acolytes doesn’t really believe in.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

247. “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

248. “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

249. “They demanded tolerance, and the right to worship as they wished, but they were never satisfied with that, he thought with exasperation. They believed their rivals were not just mistaken but evil. Catholic practices – the ways in which Europeans had worshipped for hundreds of years – were blasphemous, they said, and must be abolished. They did not practice the tolerance they preached.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett