Tom Clancy Quotes

He had to do so many things and make each appear as though it were the only thing he had to do. He had to compartmentalize everything, when on one task to pretend that the others didn't exist.
Tom Clancy
Comrade, you can deceive us. Anyone can―for a time. But not a very long time.
Tom Clancy
The assistant commander at any post is supposed to be a ruthless son of a bitch.
Tom Clancy
Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.
Tom Clancy
Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.
Tom Clancy
They loved their country largely because they controlled it.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read
Tom Clancy
He was learning to curse his newly acquired status as resident genius.
Tom Clancy
Cheating was a concept both foreign and integral to the fighting of wars.
Tom Clancy
I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.
Tom Clancy
One presidential advisor to another: "If the world made sense, we'd all have to find honest work.
Tom Clancy
Not every story started off big enough to notice.
Tom Clancy
The media "could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.
Tom Clancy
There is no seamen in the world who prefers a slow ship to a fast one. The painters painted better, the cooks took a little more time with the meals, and the technicians tightened the bolts just a little more. Their ship was no longer a cripple, and pride broke out in the crew like a rainbow after a summer shower.
Tom Clancy
People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.
Tom Clancy
Diplomacy "was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.
Tom Clancy
It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.
Tom Clancy
Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
There are only two ways we can be beaten: we die or we give up. And we're not giving up.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
How strange that he should feel trapped by plans he himself had set in motion.
Tom Clancy
A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.
Tom Clancy
A rare academic (was) a man who knew what he didn't know.
Tom Clancy
A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.
Tom Clancy
It wasn't an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
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.
Tom Clancy
He had to grow his own NCOs.
Tom Clancy
I inherited curiosity from my Dad.
Tom Clancy
Poor people have poor options. Chavez found the Army almost by accident, and had found it a true open of security and opportunity and fellowship and respect.
Tom Clancy
The extraneous duties, in a sense, were the job.
Tom Clancy
You couldn't allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight.
Tom Clancy
If you don't write it down, it never happened.Cathy (& Jack) Ryan
Tom Clancy
Danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear.
Tom Clancy
Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.
Tom Clancy
if you don't write it down, then it never happened
Tom Clancy
I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.
Tom Clancy
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy