Tom Clancy Quotes

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read

Beware the fury of a patient man

Fix your eyes forward on what you can do, not back on what you cannot change.

What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else.

Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.

Nothing is as real as a dream. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Because the dream is within you, no one can take it away.

The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.

I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.

It is a principle of diplomacy that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

Colleges typically did not tell you that ninety percent of your education came after you hung the parchment on the wall. People might ask for a rebate.

If you want to kick the tiger in his ass you'd better have a plan for dealing with his teeth

Being a victim is more palatable than having to recognize the intrinsic contradictions of one's own governing philosophy.

When you have stopped learning you have begun to die.

Remember, for every shot you fire, someone, somewhere, is making money.

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.

There are only two ways we can be beaten: we die or we give up. And we're not giving up.

The noblest of ideas have always been protected by warriors.

The nice thing about enemies is you know where they stand. This is not always true of friends." --General Sergey Voloshin

An overnight success is ten years in the making.

(Stereotyping) is only for those without the imagination to see people as they are instead of being like someone else they understand.

In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying: As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "What now?", is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

Surviving is much more painful than death.

Most things in here don't react well to bullets.

She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life that life itself. When I was in the middle of 'Red Storm Rising' by Tom Clancy - which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist - you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn't have noticed.

Time is something that fills the empty spaces of life

Even true believers had consciences, Too bad.

The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes—and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions; only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.

A conscience is the price of morality, and morality is the price of civilization.

I understand why we do that now. It’s a help, not a threat. It’s something to remind you how important words are. Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.

Of all human lamentations, without doubt, the most common is if only I had known. But we can't know, and so days of death and fire so often begin no differently than those of love and warmth.

Danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear.

tom clancy probably wears a baseball hat when he has sex

You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf... You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired – it’s hard work.

One presidential advisor to another: "If the world made sense, we'd all have to find honest work.

All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York.

Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.

To Ronald Wilson Regan, The Fortieth President of The United States: The Man Who Won The War.

She didn't strike me as a "crossword in ink" kind of girl

My life is a very simple life thank you

So few people were left who knew what combat was like. People were so easy to frighten. Combat taught a man what to fear – and what to ignore.

Every country in the world had a bureaucracy, whose entire purpose was to delay important things from happening.

A trend was a trend only because people thought it so. And in thinking it so, they made it so.

We wait. No sense spooking him. We let him come in nice and close while we do our famous imitation of a hole in the water,

Morituri Non Cognant (Those Who are About to Die, Just Don't know)

Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.

Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.

A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.

The assistant commander at any post is supposed to be a ruthless son of a bitch.

Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost- and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they?

The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.

The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read.

The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest.

One thing about flying that he never got used to was that no matter how awful the weather was on the ground, if you flew high enough you could always find the sun.

every sailor needs someone to return to, that every woman needs someone to wait for.

Anyone can deceive us .... for a time. [KGB]

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud,

You can act like a policeman or a soldier, but not both.

If the First Toddler wears it, it has to be fashionable.

A wise man knows his limitations.’ And a bold one seizes opportunities.

If you give people a firm opinion, you run the risk of being wrong. Guess what? People remember when you’re wrong a lot more often than when you’re right. So the tendency is to include all the possibilities. It’s intellectually honest, even.

Russia will invade Ukraine, probably within the next few weeks. They will annex the Crimea. From there, if they meet no resistance from the West, they will take more of the country,

Tango Down

Mr. President. Douglas MacArthur said every military disaster can be explained in two words: ‘Too late.

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC WILL ENDURE UNTIL THE DAY CONGRESS DISCOVERS THAT IT CAN BRIBE THE PUBLIC WITH THE PUBLIC’S MONEY—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE.

the motto of the whole intelligence community: ‘We bet your life.

Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.

All history is really nothing more than the application of ideology to the past.

To Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Won the War.

after you stop believing in santa claus, the whole world just goes downhill

You just had to apply judgment to your action, and such judgment came with experience—but experience often came from bad decisions.

War is the ultimate criminal act, an armed robbery writ large. And it’s always about greed. It’s always a nation that wants something another nation has. And you defeat that nation by recognizing what it wants and denying it to them.

Courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits.

Politicians are more concerned with “issues” than “principles,” but talked as though the two nouns had the same meaning.

People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.

One of the compensations for wearing a uniform and earning less money than an equally talented man can make in the real world is the off chance of being killed.

The human mind has a way of punishing itself for killing a fellow man. It remembers and relives the incident again and again.

At this table, a loud voice was just a man venting his stress. A quiet one was far more dangerous.

I’ll indulge you and look at the pictures.

The most important lesson that came out of Vietnam for me was that Marines take care of Marines.

people who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions.

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.

It’s a leadership function. They taught me that at Quantico. The troops have to see you doing the job. They have to know you’re there for them.” And I have to be sure that it’s all real, that I actually am the President.

You can always find an expert to confirm your belief, no matter how ridiculous.

The mark of a good officer, Wegener repeatedly told his youngsters, was willingness to admit he had something yet to learn.

The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.

Tradition is important,” Evans said. “For a soldier, tradition is often the reason one carries on when there are so many reasons not to. It’s more than just yourself, more than just your mates—but it’s not just something for soldiers, is it? It is true—or should be true—of any professional community.

Clifford Rutledge II was the perfect diplomat. He believed in little beyond his own career, some vague notions of international amity, and his personal ability to make it come about and to avoid war through the sheer force of his brilliance.

And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning -- and, once decided, best unseen.

Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation. Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew different parts of the whole story, but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate fragments of what had ...once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.

Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.

The President was trapped – and with nearly every president, it had come about from his own words. Presidential promises and statements… The people had this annoying way of remembering them. And even if they didn't, there were journalists and political rivals never passed on a chance to make the necessary reminders.

Okay, here’s the first speech. You guys know what ‘black’ means, right? It means a program or project that is not acknowledged by the government. People pretend it doesn’t exist. The Campus takes that one step further: We really do not exist. There is not a single written document in the possession of any government employee that has a single word about us. From this moment on, you two young gentlemen do not exist.

Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that had to be followed up on as potential espionage cues. Russians, on the other hand, were too orderly by nature to make such distractions appear natural.

The remarkable thing was that everyone accepted the entire process, seemingly as normal as physical laws of nature, despite the fact that it was really as ethereal as a rainbow. The money did not physically exist. Even “real” money was only specially made paper printed with black ink on the front and green on the back. What backed the money was not gold or something of intrinsic value, but rather the collective belief that money had value because it had to have such value.

To a man, professional soldiers despised terrorists, and each would dream about getting them in an even-up-battle; the idea of the Field of Honor had never died for the real professionals. It was the place where the ultimate decision was made on the basis of courage and skill, on the basis of manhood itself, and it was this concept that marked the professional soldier as a romantic, a person who truly believed in the rules.

Sandra O'Toole walked back to the nurses' station, remembering what she alone had seen. Kelly's face turning so white that her first reaction to it was that he must be in shock, then the tumult behind her as she reached for her patient -- but then what? It wasn't like the first time at all. Kelly's face has transformed itself. Only an instant, like opening a door into some other place, and she'd seen something she had never imagined. Something very old and feral and ugly. The eyes not wide, but focused on something she could not see. The pallor of his face not that of shock, but of rage. His hands balled briefly into fists of quivering stone. And then his face had changed again. There had been comprehension to replace the blind, killing rage, and what she'd seen next was the most dangerous sight she had ever beheld, though she knew not why. Then the door closed, Kelly's eyes shut, and when he opened them, his face was unnaturally serene. The complete sequence had not taken four seconds, she realized, all of it while Rosen and Douglas had been scuffling against the wall. He'd passed from horror to rage to understanding -- then to concealment, but what had come in between comprehension and disguise was the most frightening thing of all. What had she seen in the face of this man? It took her a moment to answer the question. Death was what she'd seen. Controlled. Planned. Disciplined. But it was still Death, living in the mind of a man.

Therefore, to you, and to the fifty governors, I have a request. Please, do not send me politicians. We do not have the time to do the things that must be done through that process. I need people who do real things in the real world. I need people who do not want to live in Washington. I need people who will not try to work the system. I need people who will come here at great personal sacrifice to do an important job, and then return home to their normal lives. “I want engineers who know how things are built. I want physicians who know how to make sick people well. I want cops who know what it means when your civil rights are violated by a criminal. I want farmers who grow real food on real farms. I want people who know what it’s like to have dirty hands, and pay a mortgage bill, and raise kids, and worry about the future. I want people who know they’re working for you and not themselves. That’s what I want. That’s what I need. I think that’s what a lot of you want, too.