Quotes from Fall of Giants

“A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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, quote from Fall of Giants

“I think more people should shoot newspaper editors...it might improve the press”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“You never get cheered for telling people the situation is not as simple as they think.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“I could fall for you in a heartbeat”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“The ability to listen to smart people who disagree with you is a rare talent”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Moderates always seem to deal in hopes rather than in facts.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“There’s a saying: ‘If you owe a hundred dollars, the bank has you in its power; but if you owe a million dollars, you have the bank in your power.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“In every country, those who were against war had been overruled. The Austrians had attacked Serbia when they might have held back; the Russians had mobilized instead of negotiating; the Germans had refused to attend an international conference to settle the issue; the French had been offered the chance to remain neutral and had spurned it; and now the British were about to join in when they might easily have remained on the sidelines.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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, quote from Fall of Giants

“A waiter appeared, and Gus said: “Bring coffee for my guests, please, and a plate of ham sandwiches.” He deliberately did not ask them what they wanted. He had seen Woodrow Wilson act like this with people he wanted to intimidate.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Marvelous, isn’t it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they’re fucking dead.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Mam kissed Ethel and said: “I'm glad to see you settled at last, anyway,” That word ANYWAY carried a lot of baggage, Ethel thought. It meant: “Congratulations, even though you're a fallen woman, and you've got an illegitmate child whose father no one knows, and you're marrying a Jew, and living in London, which is the same as Sodom and Gomorrah.” But Ethel accepted Mam's qualified blessing and vowed never to say such things to her own child.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“I went to the doctor," said the woman next to Ethel. "I said to him, 'I've got an itchy twat.'"

[...]
She went on: "The doctor says to me, he goes, 'You shouldn't say that, it's a rude word.'"

[...]

"I says to him, 'What should I say, then, doctor?' He says to me, 'Say you've got an itchy finger.'"

[...]

"He says to me, 'Do your finger itch you all the time, Mrs. Perkins, or just now and again?'"

Mildred paused, and the women were silent, waiting for the punch line.

"I says, 'No, doctor, only when I piss through it.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“—Que Dios nos libre de los hombres con un destino dictado por la voluntad divina”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“But her angry feminism had set as hard as concrete during years of living alongside the tough, hardworking, dirt-poor women of London’s East End. Men often told a fairy tale in which there was a division of labor in families, the man going out to earn money, the woman looking after home and children. Reality was different. Most of the women Ethel knew worked twelve hours a day and looked after home and children as well. Underfed, overworked, living in hovels, and dressed in rags, they could still sing songs and laugh and love their children. In Ethel’s view one of those women had more right to vote than any ten men.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“You're the one who doesn't understand," Lev said. "In America, I have my own car. There's more food than you can eat, all the booze I want, all the cigarettes I can smoke. I have five suits!"

"What's the point in having five suits?" Grigori said in frustration. "It's like having five beds. You can only use one at a time!”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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, quote from Fall of Giants

“Lenin’s idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“A wine cellar requires order, forethought and good taste,’ the old man used to say. ‘These are the virtues that made Britain great.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Monika answered for her father. Giving Walter a conspiratorial grin, she said: “Daddy used to say that if the tsar had been born to a different station in life, he might, with an effort, have become a competent postman.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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, quote from Fall of Giants

“Era un día soleado de principios de verano, y se oía el canto de los pájaros. En un huerto cercano que hasta entonces se había librado de los bombardeos, los manzanos florecían de forma espectacular. El hombre era el único animal que acababa con la vida de los de su propia especie por millones y que convertía el paisaje en un terreno yermo, plagado de cráteres provocados por las bombas y alambradas de espino. Walter tuvo el pensamiento apocalíptico de que, tal vez, la humanidad se borraría a sí misma de la faz de la tierra y dejaría el mundo a los pájaros y a los árboles. Tal vez eso fuera lo mejor.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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, quote from Fall of Giants

“The world was changing so fast it was hard to keep up. Grigori had never been inside”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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, quote from Fall of Giants

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Popular quotes

“I realized I had let my own incapacity to recover from my past shrink my world so that it was big enough for only me. It was hitting me now, really for the first time, how being fucked up can turn into a form of narcissism. So that I barely acknowledged that others might need something from me.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List

“Who needs a blue sky when he's unhappy? Robert was right. The sky whether grey or blue, is cold and unemotional, and ultimately even the sun is only a fireball that, unaffected by everything going on here below on Earth, simply spews in masses of magma into space.”
― Nicolas Barreau, quote from One Evening in Paris

“And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one,—to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

“I will stop at nothing to make you mine, Onyx.”
― Victoria Ashley, quote from Hemy

“Believe me, a highly strung brain such as yours demands occasional relaxation from the strain of domestic surroundings. Forget for a little while that children want music lessons, and boots, and bicycles, with tincture of rhubarb three times a day; forget there are such things in life as cooks, and house decorators, and next-door dogs, and butchers’ bills. Go away to some green corner of the earth, where all is new and strange to you, where your over-wrought mind will gather peace and fresh ideas. Go away for a space and give me time to miss you, and to reflect upon your goodness and virtue, which, continually present with me, I may, human-like, be apt to forget, as one, through use, grows indifferent to the blessing of the sun and the beauty of the moon. Go away, and come back refreshed in mind and body, a brighter, better man—if that be possible—than when you went away.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, quote from Three Men on the Bummel

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