Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Ken Follett

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “She shook her head in perplexity. “I’ll never know where you got the idea that you were destined for greatness.” She dropped the rest of the rabbit in the pot and begun to clean the underside of its skin. She would use the fur. “You certainly didn’t inherit it from your forebears.”

— Ken Follett

307. “Grigori had become good at that, and in consequence had won the loyalty of his platoon.”

— Ken Follett

308. “Her Protestant pastor had been sympathetic, until the Gestapo terrified him into silence. Perhaps the same would happen again. But she did not know what else to do. Heinrich took.”

— Ken Follett

309. “She loved his seriousness. Most men, even quite clever ones, became silly when they talked to women. Walter spoke to her just as intelligently as he spoke to Robert or Fitz, and – even more unusually – he listened to her answers.”

— Ken Follett

310. “Excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility. – Cuthbert Whitehead.”

— Ken Follett

311. “There’s no rule that says public opinion has to be consistent.” Gus found his boss’s calm admirable, but a bit frustrating. “How the heck do you deal with that?” Wilson smiled, showing his bad teeth. “Gus, did someone tell you politics was easy?”

— Ken Follett

312. “My father taught us to learn as much as possible of any tongue we came across. He says it’s better than money in the bank.”

— Ken Follett

313. “If you want to change the world, then foreign relations is the field in which you can do the most good – or evil.”

— Ken Follett

314. “Philip knelt before the altar and stayed there a moment, conscious that righteous indignation was not the appropriate state of mind for a worshiper. When he had cooled down a little he rose and passed on.”

— Ken Follett

315. “They all spoke some German, having been living in the German-speaking region of Switzerland. Lenin himself spoke it well. He was a remarkable linguist, Walter learned. He was fluent in French, spoke passable English, and read Aristotle in ancient Greek. Lenin’s idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.”

— Ken Follett

316. “He forced himself to take a single step forward; and once he had done that the second was a little less difficult, and the third was almost easy.”

— Ken Follett

317. “She grinned at her husband. He was wearing a blue towelling bathrobe that was too small for him, and it showed his long, muscular legs. ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ she said, and she picked up the phone. It was her mother. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said.”

— Ken Follett

318. “Fascism is a lie, but an alluring one”.”

— Ken Follett

319. “Maud had feared this. Fitz was no compromiser. He believed that Britain should issue orders and the world should obey. The idea that the government might have to negotiate with others as equals was abhorrent to him. And there were distressingly many who agreed.”

— Ken Follett

320. “What should we do?” “If you want to live, you should go to church, confess your sins, pray, and lead a better life.”

— Ken Follett

321. “When you were trying to enforce law and order, it was difficult to explain that the rules did not actually apply to you personally.”

— Ken Follett

322. “No matter how long she argued, people would believe the priests, not.”

— Ken Follett

323. “Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.”

— Ken Follett

324. “In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.”

— Ken Follett

325. “You didn’t fail me. You fed me and took care of me... ” But there was something more important than all that, he thought. What Tom had given him was nothing so commonplace as food and shelter. Tom had given him something unique, something no other man had to give, something even his own father could not have given him: something that was a passion, a skill, an art, and a way of life. “You gave me a cathedral...”

— Ken Follett

326. “Perhaps it was irresponsible, Tom thought, to turn down that dull job in Exeter and go looking for a cathedral to build; but I’ve always been able to feed them all, despite my recklessness.”

— Ken Follett

327. “It seemed trivial. After the battlefield it was going to be difficult to take seriously some of the stuff people worried about in peacetime.”

— Ken Follett

328. “Fitz was suspicious of peace plans. His main concern was that Britain should maintain its position as the most powerful nation in the world. He was afraid the Liberal government might let that position slip, out of some foolish belief that all nations were equally sovereign. Sir.”

— Ken Follett

329. “And so, Aldred thought, great ones sin with impunity while lesser men are brutally chastised.”

— Ken Follett

330. “One is a comfortable partnership, where two people share the same hopes and fears, raise children as a team, and give each other comfort and help.”

— Ken Follett

331. “Perhaps the savages will always be in control, Phillip said gloomily. Perhaps greed will always outweigh wisdom in the councils of the mighty; perhaps fear will always overcome compassion in the mind of a man with a sword in his hand.”

— Ken Follett

332. “A fool was just a fool, but a fool in the White House was the most dangerous person in the world.”

— Ken Follett

333. “Some men craved deference; others craved wine, or the bodies of beautiful women, or the monastic life of order and obedience. What did Ned crave? The answer came into his mind with a speed and effortlessness that took him by surprise: justice.”

— Ken Follett

334. “Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made this century, to the proposition that” – he had gone formal, but now he reverted to plain language – “race has no place in American life or law.”

— Ken Follett

335. “The victim had been John Lewis, the theology student. He had been attacked by thugs in a white restroom in Rock Hill, South Carolina.”

— Ken Follett

336. “The working class are more numerous than the ruling class, and stronger. They depend on us for everything. We provide their food and build their houses and make their clothes, and without us they die. They can’t do anything unless we let them.”

— Ken Follett

337. “It was a bold request, but she hated delay: an hour turned into a day, and a day turned into a week, and bright ideas died from lack of oxygen.”

— Ken Follett

338. “Edgar’s family believed in plans. His father had often said that you had to build the entire boat in your imagination before picking up the first piece of timber.”

— Ken Follett

339. “What we did in that momentous year of 1558 caused political strife, revolt, civil war, and invasion. There were times, in later years, when in the depths of despair I would wonder whether it had been worth it. The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt. So, if I had known then what I know now, would I have done the same? Hell yes.”

— Ken Follett

340. “Like so many parties, this one was work for a lot of the guests.”

— Ken Follett

341. “Alison was relieved: she would have hated to see Mary lose her dignity as well as her life. “Follow me,” said the sheriff. Mary turned back momentarily and took an ivory crucifix from its hook on the wall over the altar. With the cross pressed to her heavy bosom and the prayer book in her other hand she walked behind the sheriff, and Alison followed.”

— Ken Follett

342. “And that would be sufficient, if we lived in a world that was ruled by laws.” Aldred sat on a stool, leaned forward, and spoke quietly. “But the man matters more than the law, as you know.”

— Ken Follett

343. “She had wanted cities, music, people, ideas. Now the desire for those things had left her, and she could not understand how she had ever wanted them. Peace was all a human being ought to ask for, it seemed to her.”

— Ken Follett

344. “A cathedral, like a symphony, has a coherent plan, its windows and arches form rhythms, its decorations have themes and tell stories, but the whole thing is so rich that at first it overwhelms us.”

— Ken Follett

345. “When there is no longer any possibility of running away, you realize how fiercely you can fight.”

— Ken Follett