Top 100 Ken Follett Quotes
#1. The Ottoman Empire was in decline, held back from modernization by a conservative Muslim priesthood.
Ken Follett
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. She had always liked what Scarlett O'Hara said in Gone with the Wind: I'll think about it tomorrow. Not anymore.
Ken Follett
#5. The Japanese discussed extending their empire, Bexforth went on. They had already annexed the vast region of Manchuria, Greg
Ken Follett
#6. Repress those who complain, rather than address their discontents.
Ken Follett
#7. Birmingham was a dirty industrial city, and from the plane it had a delicate rose-pink aura of pollution, like the chiffon scarf around the neck of an old prostitute.
Ken Follett
#8. When people are perfectly polite, it usually means they don't really care. A little awkwardness is more sincere.
Ken Follett
#9. 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
#10. Did she go to Washington Redskins football games, or follow the Nats baseball team?
Ken Follett
#11. Americans talked about voters the same way Russians talked about Stalin. They had to be obeyed.
Ken Follett
#12. 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
#13. There's a time and place for spontaneity,
Ken Follett
#14. I adore you' she said. 'When you go, I'll cry. But I'm not going to spoil today by being miserable about tomorrow
Ken Follett
#15. When I'm brave and strong, and care for children and the sick and the poor, I become a better person. And when I'm cruel, cowardly, or tell lies, or get drunk, I turn into someone less worthy, and I can't respect myself. That's the divine retribution I believe in
Ken Follett
#16. just as the Monroe Doctrine gave the same rights to the USA in South America.
Ken Follett
#17. 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
#18. People change'. Weak women change to please men, Lili thought.
Ken Follett
#19. 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
#20. Chaperoning rules had relaxed since the outbreak of war. It was no longer scandalous for a single woman to go out unescorted in the daytime.
Ken Follett
#21. Nor would he care what the target was. If they bombed Chile, it would be the same as bombing New York.
Ken Follett
#22. You don't catch people's religions the way you catch their fleas
Ken Follett
#23. The original eight cryptanalysts were supplemented, after Pearl Harbor, by some of the musicians from the band of the sunken battleship California. For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.
Ken Follett
#24. Handel's "He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd," a popular anthem with elaborate part singing that the congregation performed faultlessly. As hundreds of tenor voices soared across the
Ken Follett
#25. Our whole strategy must be to prevent the Allies from securing a beachhead, because once they achieve that, the battle is lost ... perhaps even the war.
Ken Follett
#26. The knowledge that someone was trying his best to kill you was overwhelmingly oppressive,
Ken Follett
#27. The worst thing of all would be to disgrace himself. He was more afraid of that than of dying.
Ken Follett
#28. But the lesson of Abraham's story is that God demands the best we have to offer, that which is most precious to us.
Ken Follett
#29. He was seething inside with a new emotion. Nothing seemed very important anymore except the Princess. He was single-minded about her. He was enchanted. He was possessed. He was in love.
Ken Follett
#30. 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
#31. When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?'
Ken Follett
#32. ... sentiments which Feliks had already come to recognise as being characteristic of The Times, which would have described the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as strong rulers who could do nothing but good for the stability of the international situation.
Ken Follett
#33. Grigori had encountered such bands before. They were called the Black Hundreds, part of the Union of the Russian People, a right-wing group that wanted to return to the golden age when the tsar was the unchallenged father of his people and Russia had no liberals, no socialists, and no Jews. Their
Ken Follett
#34. We'll see, Grigori thought as he drifted off to sleep. Brave words came easily in the dark. Daylight might tell a different story.
Ken Follett
#36. 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
#37. Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.
Ken Follett
#38. And dances at night. Daisy greeted the people she knew, which was
Ken Follett
#39. We who are born poor have to use cunning to get what we want. Scruples are for the privileged.
Ken Follett
#40. Now, I call this nice. I got my daughter, my granddaughter, and my great-grandson, all in the same room. What more could a man ask of life?" He took a Welsh cake.
Ken Follett
#41. 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
#42. Addison's disease and colitis. Twice a day the doctors shot him up with a
Ken Follett
#43. All men make mistakes,' said the ancient Greek Sophocles. 'But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.
Ken Follett
#44. America is free because it has disrespectful newspapers and television shows to expose and shame presidents
Ken Follett
#45. Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.
Ken Follett
#46. We've been married almost a year, and I've known you for two, but I've never met one of your colleagues," Rebecca said. "They would bore you,
Ken Follett
#47. Man who betrayed you once would betray you twice.
Ken Follett
#48. His talent was to express his readers' most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.
Ken Follett
#49. If earls' daughters were allowed to marry whom they please, we'd all be ruled by strolling minstrels and dark-eyed outlaws.
Ken Follett
#50. Patria o muerte! Motherland or death! Cuba si, yanqui no!
Ken Follett
#51. 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
#52. Don't look so sad," she said. Her eyes were full of tears.
"I can't help it," he said. "I am sad."
"I'm sorry I've made you so unhappy."
"Don't be sorry for that. Be sorry that you made me so happy. That's what hurts, woman. That you made me so happy.
Ken Follett
#53. 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?
Ken Follett
#55. Looking in the full-length mirror, she thought, I've got everything I had twenty years ago - it's all just three inches lower.
Ken Follett
#56. You should first follow the plow if you want to dance the harvest jig.
Ken Follett
#57. In that case, do not expect to be rescued by the Red Army, Gorbachev said.
Ken Follett
#58. After a certain point, most people, including editors, will tell you everything you do is great.
Ken Follett
#59. He was famous for holding meetings at which no one was allowed to sit down: he believed people reached decisions faster that way. The
Ken Follett
#60. When you're thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.
Ken Follett
#61. More than two hundred Aberowen men were killed on the first day of July, there on the banks of the Somme River. I have been told that the total of British casualties is over fifty thousand!
Ken Follett
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. In the Arab world, every work of art has a tiny flaw, so that it doesn't sacrilegiously compete with the perfection of God.
Ken Follett
#65. You're a queer?"
"That's exactly what I am. I didn't choose to be."
After a while Woody put his arm around Chuck's shoulders.
"Well, what the hell," he said. "At least you're not a Republican.
Ken Follett
#66. I'm glad to see that the crusading spirit of your forebears hasn't been entirely obliterated by rock and roll.
Ken Follett
#67. Protestors can have a big impact, but in the end it's governments that reshape the world.
Ken Follett
#68. All birds and men are sure to die but songs may live forever.
Ken Follett
#69. 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
#70. I wake up with the story in my head, so I really like to be at my desk about five minutes after I wake up. So I don't get dressed. I put on a bathrobe, I make tea and sit at my desk.
Ken Follett
#71. 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
#72. What you're doing is wrong," he said. "I mean evil. To give up happiness like this is like throwing jewels into the ocean. It's far worse than any sin.
Ken Follett
#73. Rommel could smell the sea. At Torbruk the heat and the dust and flies were as bad as they had been in the desert, but it was all made bearable by that occasional whiff of salty dampness in the faint breeze.
Ken Follett
#74. My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.
Ken Follett
#75. With the fascination of a condemned man watching the carpenter build the gallows.
Ken Follett
#76. The truth is not arrived at by majority vote.
Ken Follett
#77. 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
#79. Since Lenin died, every Soviet leader had been a liar. They had all glossed over what was wrong and declined to acknowledge reality. The most striking characteristic of Soviet leadership for the last sixty-five year was the refusal to face facts.(1075)
Ken Follett
#80. Why do you have to be the same as the others? ... Most of them are stupid.
Ken Follett
#81. There was much talk about why the prime minister had brought back such a troublesome and unpredictable colleague, and the consensus was that he preferred to have Churchill inside the tent spitting out.
Ken Follett
#82. He was the kind of man George had been fighting for a decade: an ugly, fat, foul-mouthed, stupid white racist.
Ken Follett
#83. hear him laughing. Perhaps this was the moment to mention Vasili Yenkov. He opened his desk drawer and took out Yenkov's KGB file. He picked up a folder of documents for Khrushchev to sign, then he hesitated. He was
Ken Follett
#84. jaw. He examined his morning beard, pulling the loose skin this way
Ken Follett
#85. Fascism is on the march," Lloyd began. "And it is dangerously attractive. It gives false hope to the unemployed. It wears a spurious patriotism, as the Fascists themselves wear imitation military uniforms.
Ken Follett
#86. 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
#87. If we're all aggressive, obedient solders [sic], who's going to write the poems and play the blues and go on anti-war protest marches?
Ken Follett
#88. Philip believed that caring for people was the service of God. That was what salvation was about.
Ken Follett
#89. However, she was horrified the following morning when she opened the Daily Mail at breakfast. The leading article was headed THE HUNS MUST PAY. The paper argued that food aid should be sent to Germany - only because "if Germany were starved to death she could not pay what she owes.
Ken Follett
#90. ... people always credit prime ministers with more brains than they've got.
Ken Follett
#91. I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'
Ken Follett
#92. Dimka said angrily: "Why the hell do you risk everything for the sake of an empty protest?" "We live in a brutal tyranny," she said. "We have to do something to keep hope alive." "We
Ken Follett
#93. I could weep for all the innocent women and children who were burned and maimed in London - and it doesn't help at all to know that German women and children are suffering the same.
Ken Follett
#94. The world was changing so fast it was hard to keep up. Grigori had never been inside
Ken Follett
#95. I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.
Ken Follett
#96. Everything in Tom's cathedral looked as if it was meant to be. Perhaps her life was like that, everything foreordained in a grand design, and she was like a foolish builder who wanted a waterfall in the chancel.
Ken Follett
#97. Philip couldn't fornicate if you put him in a barrel with three whores.
Ken Follett
#99. I've met the people who run Alabama. Believe me, they're not that smart.
Ken Follett
#100. In both cases, weakness and scruples had defeated strength and ruthlessness.
Ken Follett
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