Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Ken Follett

210. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

213. “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

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

— Ken Follett

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Ken Follett

218. “Growing up is learning to deceive.”

— Ken Follett

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

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

— Ken Follett

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Ken Follett

236. “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

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

— Ken Follett

238. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

241. “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

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

— Ken Follett

243. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

247. “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

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

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

250. “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