Fall of Giants - Ken Follet
“The truth is not arrived at by majority vote.”
Notable quotes or quotable notes - that is the question :)
“A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.”
“The ability to listen to smart people who disagree with you is a rare talent”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
“Lenin’s idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.”
“In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.”
“A wine cellar requires order, forethought and good taste,’ the old man used to say. ‘These are the virtues that made Britain great.”
“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.”
“It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate, and the newspapers were always ready to supply that need.”
“So much hangs on the decisions of a small number of poorly educated people.” “That’s democracy.” Gus smiled. “A terrible way to run a country, but every other system is worse.”
There’s no rule that says public opinion has to be consistent.”