Quotes from Ken Follett

After the Battle of Midway it was clear that the Pacific war would be won by planes launched from ships. Both Japan and the United States began crash programs to build aircraft carriers as fast as possible. During 1943 and 1944, Japan produced seven of these huge, costly vessels. In the same period, the United States produced ninety.

A German attack on Russia's ally France would, in reality, be defensive—but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.

Erik was one of those inadequate people who were so scared by life that they preferred to live under harsh authority, to be told what to do and what to think by a government that allowed no dissent. They were foolish and dangerous, but there were an awful lot of them.

there are no saints in politics, but imperfect people can make the world a better place.

When you're about to be turned down, go for a postponement.

It was said that pilgrims should not spend too much time planning their journey, for they might learn of so many hazards that they would decide not to go.

You can't write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they're called literary novels.

Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. "This is very important to you, this box." "It's important to the world." Ishmael said: "The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die." He shrugged. He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would.

Gwenda sighed. She did not know how to say what she felt. It was not just love. She thought about him all the time, and she did not know how she could live without him. She daydreamed about kidnapping him and locking him up in a hut deep in the forest so that he could never escape from her.

She had believed that love was something she could bestow upon whomever she liked, and that her main responsibility was to choose cleverly.

He believed in Communism the way most people believed in God: he would not be greatly surprised or disappointed if he turned out to be wrong, and meanwhile it made little difference to the way he lived.

He was looking forward to letting Joanne know, in a casual way, that he had read these books.

This was her destiny, and it was a fit and proper one. She was not unwilling, but she knew this was a fateful moment, and she had a sense of doors closing behind her and the path of her life being fixed irrevocably.

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.

War was grueling and oppressive and frustrating and uncomfortable, but one had friends. If peace brought back loneliness, Godliman thought he would not be able to live with it.

He was like a man who has got used to drinking the finest wine, and now finds that everyday wine thats like vinegar.

A man who had a love affair was considered wicked but romantic; a woman who did the same was a whore.

After all, if you can't kill a man in front of God's face you probably shouldn't kill him at all.

The power of a king was not absolute, after all: it could be restrained by the will of the people.

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.

They're Americans when they win races, and when they get conscripted into the army,' Dave said. 'But they're Negroes when they want to buy the house next door to yours.

The truth is not arrived at by majority vote.

Protestors can have a big impact, but in the end it's governments that reshape the world.

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