Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Ken Follett

218. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

221. “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

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

— Ken Follett

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

227. “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

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

— Ken Follett

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Ken Follett

237. “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

238. “It was unladylike even to know the name of your lawyer, let alone to understand your rights under the law. No wonder women were mercilessly exploited.”

— Ken Follett

239. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Ken Follett

246. “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

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

— Ken Follett

248. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett