Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “Don’t be a hero. Leave that to them that started the war – the upper classes, the Conservatives, the officers.”

— Ken Follett

252. “How exciting to be at the center of power.” “It is exciting, but strangely enough it doesn’t feel like the center of power. In a democracy the president is subject to the voters.” “But surely he doesn’t just do what the public wants.” “Not exactly, no. President Wilson says a leader must treat public opinion the way a sailor deals with the wind, using it to blow the ship in one direction or another, but never trying to go directly against it.”

— Ken Follett

253. “Winston was an odd mix, Fitz thought: aristocrat and man of the people, a brilliant administrator who could never resist meddling in other people’s departments, a charmer who was disliked by most of his political colleagues.”

— Ken Follett

254. “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

255. “This guy was high on Greg’s suspect list. He was German, though he had left in the mid-1930s and gone to London. He was an anti-Nazi but not a Communist: his politics were Social Democrat. He was married to an American girl, an artist. Talking to him over lunch, Greg found no reason for suspicion: he seemed to love living in America and to be interested in little but his work. But with foreigners you could never be quite sure where their ultimate loyalty lay.”

— Ken Follett

256. “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

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

— Ken Follett

258. “Its job was to arrange the painless deaths of handicapped people who could not survive without costly care. It had done splendid work in the last couple of years, disposing of tens of thousands of useless people. The problem was that German public opinion was not yet sophisticated enough to understand the need for such deaths, so the program had to be kept quiet.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

260. “That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character – I have a dream today.”

— Ken Follett

261. “A woman would always prefer to be remembered than forgotten.”

— Ken Follett

262. “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

263. “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

264. “For years we’ve been campaigning against the rule that women can’t vote. That’s the barrier. Once it’s broken down, people will see further concessions as mere technicalities. It will be relatively easy to get the voting age lowered and other restrictions eased.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

266. “It was an odd relationship, but then she was an extraordinary woman: a prioress who doubted much of what the church taught; an acclaimed healer who rejected medicine as practised by physicians; and a nun who made enthusiastic love to her man whenever she could get away with it. If I wanted a normal relationship, Merthin told himself, I should have picked a normal girl.”

— Ken Follett

267. “Walli’s sister came into the room. Lili was almost three years younger, and these days he was not sure how to treat her. For as long as he could remember she had been a pain in the neck, like a younger boy but sillier. However, lately she had become more sensible and, to complicate matters, some of her friends had breasts.”

— Ken Follett

268. “An apology is designed to make the offender feel okay so that he can do it again. Don’t be sorry.” Kincaid tried to gather the shreds.”

— Ken Follett

269. “This was not a political party. It was an army.”

— Ken Follett

270. “Boy did not see why two great nations such as England and Germany should go to war over a half-barbaric wasteland such as Poland.”

— Ken Follett

271. “Weapons seem to be the issue now, isn’t it?” “Aye,” said Billy. “The Germans and the Italians are supplying the rebels with guns and ammunition, as well as fighter planes and pilots. But no one is helping the elected Spanish government.”

— Ken Follett

272. “Fitz did not censor her mail but, as the head of the family, he had the right to read any letter addressed to a female relative living in his house. No respectable woman would object.”

— Ken Follett

273. “When Philip relived that day in his nightmares, and woke up sweating and screaming in the dark, he would always be able to calm himself, and eventually relax into sleep again, by bringing to mind that final tableau, and the way the screaming and the wounds had been swept aside by the unarmed man with the cross.”

— Ken Follett

274. “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

275. “Everybody takes what they life from the teachings of the church, and ignores the parts that don’t suit them.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

277. “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

278. “I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn’t happen, but it might have.”

— Ken Follett

279. “Ethel had not gone to chapel – there was too much to do in the house. “What did you pray about?” “I asked the Lord to help us understand why He allowed the explosion down the pit.” Billy cast a nervous glance at Da, who was not smiling. Da said severely: “Billy might have done better to ask God to strengthen his faith, so that he can believe without understanding.”

— Ken Follett

280. “I don’t stoop to criticize you. I despise you. – Samuel Pilaster.”

— Ken Follett

281. “I’ve met the people who run Alabama. Believe me, they’re not that smart.”

— Ken Follett

282. “We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.”

— Ken Follett

283. “You will make love to a fat Prussian general who will call you his Liebling.”

— Ken Follett

284. “They had paid her the compliment of coming to her door without an invitation, knowing they would be welcomed. They belonged to her, and she to them. They were, she realized, her family.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

286. “Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It’s the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who constantly says, like Bobby Kennedy: ‘I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot condone your methods.’ He paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

— Ken Follett

287. “It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate, and the newspapers were always ready to supply that need.”

— Ken Follett

288. “We’re all idealists,” said Lord Silverman, smoothing over the conflict like a good host. “That’s why we’re in politics. People without ideals don’t bother. But we have to confront the realities of elections and public opinion.”

— Ken Follett

289. “They were the same height and weight, and could wear each other’s clothes. But Lev had charm by the ton. He was unreliable and selfish, and he lived on the edge of the law, but women adored him. Grigori was honest and dependable, a hard worker and a serious thinker, and he was single. It would.”

— Ken Follett

290. “They all looked as Da came in from the street, wearing his meeting suit and a flat miner’s cap, perspiring from the walk up the hill. He took a step into the room, then stopped, staring. “Look who’s here,” Mam said.”

— Ken Follett

291. “An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.”

— Ken Follett

292. “Nothing is permanent, except change.”

— Ken Follett

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

— Ken Follett

294. “It was a sunny day in early summer, and he could hear birdsong. In a nearby orchard that had so far escaped shelling, apple trees were blossoming bravely. 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

295. “There was something terribly thrilling in watching the elements spit and sway and roar in fury, in standing fractionally too close to the cliff edge, feeling threatened and safe at the same time, shivering with cold and perspiring in fear. It was thrilling, and there were few thrills in her life.”

— Ken Follett

296. “The war in Continental Europe appeared to be over. Germany had won. Europe was Fascist from Poland to Sicily and from Hungary to Portugal. There was no fighting anywhere. Rumors said the British government had discussed peace terms.”

— Ken Follett

297. “She was twenty-six years old, her life was ruined, and it was her own fault.”

— Ken Follett

298. “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

299. “America is free because it has disrespectful newspapers and television shows to expose and shame presidents.”

— Ken Follett

300. “The strange thing is that everyone knows the answer. We need to decentralize decisions, introduce limited markets, and legitimize the semi-illegal gray economy so that it can grow.”

— Ken Follett