Top 100 Tom Clancy Quotes
#1. The five hundred feet up the square-spiral staircase
Tom Clancy
#2. Everything was politics, and politics was ideology, and ideology came down to personal prejudices rather than the quest for truth.
Tom Clancy
#3. There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
#4. If you don't write it down, it never happened.
Cathy (& Jack) Ryan
Tom Clancy
#5. Morituri Non Cognant (Those Who are About to Die, Just Don't know)
Tom Clancy
#6. Jack ordered a bottle of pinot noir, and they perused the menu while they chatted. "So you were at Georgetown." Melanie said it as a statement.
Tom Clancy
#7. An overnight success is ten years in the making.
Tom Clancy
#8. I don't discuss works in progress ...
Tom Clancy
#9. Marine. Say the word to any American, and you can count on a strong reaction.
Tom Clancy
#10. A bureaucrat who said no to everything rarely got in trouble.
Tom Clancy
#11. The first step in accomplishing any goal was deciding that it was possible.
Tom Clancy
#12. There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.
Tom Clancy
#13. In a toxic, festering sort o' way...
Tom Clancy
#14. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, We will fight our country's battles in the air, on land and sea. First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean, We are proud to claim the title of United States Marines. - Marine Corps Hymn
Tom Clancy
#15. If you want to kick the tiger in his ass you'd better have a plan for dealing with his teeth
Tom Clancy
#16. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud,
Tom Clancy
#17. Not a very nice place is it?" rosen asked as they came back for the last load.
"they say there's a hundred different kinds of snake there. ninety-nine are poisonous."
"and the other one?"
kelly handed a carton over to the doctor. "that one eats your ass whole.
Tom Clancy
#18. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
Tom Clancy
#19. Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?
Tom Clancy
#20. 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
#21. She didn't strike me as a "crossword in ink" kind of girl
Tom Clancy
#22. Probably what pushed the Russians over the edge was SDI. They realized they couldn't beat us.
Tom Clancy
#23. the problem with so secure a place was that it depended absolutely on secrecy which, once blown, became a fatal liability
Tom Clancy
#24. 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.
Tom Clancy
#25. Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story.
Tom Clancy
#26. Back in pre-Revolutionary America cruel and unusual punishment meant the rack and burning at the stake ... in more recent rulings it has been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons.
Tom Clancy
#27. You will come to understand how they work, their dedication and the personal sacrifices they make. For these are truly the people who stand guard on the walls of freedom, while the rest of us sleep safely in our homes.
Tom Clancy
#28. 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
#29. 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.
Tom Clancy
#30. They were wheels-up in less than fifteen minutes.
Tom Clancy
#31. Whenever somebody comes up with a good idea, there's somebody else who has never had a good idea in his life who stands up and says, Oh, you can't do that.
Tom Clancy
#32. 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
#33. Giving your book to Hollywood is like turning your daughter over to a pimp,
Tom Clancy
#34. You respect a man who says what he believes, even if you disagree with it?
Tom Clancy
#35. People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots ...
Tom Clancy
#36. A rare academic (was) a man who knew what he didn't know.
Tom Clancy
#37. office just wasn't a very good place for thinking, but every executive in the world pretended it was. Christ
Tom Clancy
#38. 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
#39. Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.
Tom Clancy
#40. and friendly fire would hurt just as bad as enemy fire.
Tom Clancy
#41. He was carrying nothing illegal, except for that which was in his head.
Tom Clancy
#42. 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
#43. A conscience is the price of morality, and morality is the price of civilization.
Tom Clancy
#44. Tears released poisons from inside, poisons which if not released could be as deadly as the real kind. The
Tom Clancy
#45. Anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can't hate black people anymore, of course, and you can't hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.
Tom Clancy
#46. Only evil of my shadow is my enemy,well die of darkness of life!
Tom Clancy
#47. The U.S. Military is us. There is no truer representation of a country than the people that it sends into the field to fight for it. The people who wear our uniform and carry our rifles into combat are our kids, and our job is to support them, because they're protecting us.
Tom Clancy
#48. 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,
Tom Clancy
#49. The dead were gone and didn't know or care what they left behind.. If the dead still lived on the surface of this earth then it was in the minds of those who remembered them ... Pg 736
Tom Clancy
#50. I think it's an intellectual duty for a person who lives in a free society to read material not only with which you agree, but with which you disagree. Because every so often somebody you think is wrong will actually turn out to be right.
Tom Clancy
#51. Therefore, it is in our mutual interests to cause unrest and chaos within America. The new American president is a weak man.
Tom Clancy
#52. Helicopters don't fly, they vibrate so badly the ground rejects them.
Tom Clancy
#53. Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.
Tom Clancy
#54. Suspense is achieved by information control: What you know. What the reader knows. What the characters know.
Tom Clancy
#55. The Americans are always investigating one another, it was their national sport.
Tom Clancy
#56. Not every story started off big enough to notice.
Tom Clancy
#57. 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.
Tom Clancy
#58. A Guards regiment, eh, Comrade Colonel? These tit-sucking children could not guard a Turkish whorehouse; much less do anything worthwhile inside of it!
While commenting on how unprepared his troops are. -Alekseyev
Tom Clancy
#59. The nice thing about enemies is you know where they stand. This is not always true of friends."
--General Sergey Voloshin
Tom Clancy
#60. You know, we're a victim of our own success," the former senator said quietly. "We've managed to handle every nation-state that ever crossed us, but these invisible bastards who work for their vision of God are harder to identify and track.
Tom Clancy
#61. Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.
Tom Clancy
#62. For over 220 years, Marines have served at the end of America's operational reach - on freedom's far frontiers. These Marines are the backbone of the ARG/MEU (SOC) team, our regional commanders' force of choice for both forward presence and crisis response.
Tom Clancy
#63. Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.
Tom Clancy
#64. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
Tom Clancy
#65. 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
#66. Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.
Tom Clancy
#67. Mr. President. Douglas MacArthur said every military disaster can be explained in two words: 'Too late.
Tom Clancy
#68. It wasn't an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.
Tom Clancy
#69. Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down.
Tom Clancy
#70. All men had their limitations. It was just that some were more dangerous than others. And while genius knew it had limits, idiocy was always unbounded.
Tom Clancy
#71. Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.
Tom Clancy
#72. Switzerland is a land where crime is virtually unknown, yet most Swiss males are required by law to keep in their homes what amounts to a portable, personal machine gun.
Tom Clancy
#73. The human mind has a way of punishing itself for killing a fellow man. It remembers and relives the incident again and again.
Tom Clancy
#74. You couldn't allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight.
Tom Clancy
#75. Under the circumstances, washing without soap wasn't even as good as kissing your sister.
Tom Clancy
#76. No matter what you or anyone else does, there will be someone who says that there's something bad about it.
Tom Clancy
#77. People who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions.
Tom Clancy
#78. I'll indulge you and look at the pictures.
Tom Clancy
#79. Politicians are more concerned with "issues" than "principles," but talked as though the two nouns had the same meaning.
Tom Clancy
#80. The allocation of research money was a political act.
Tom Clancy
#81. If the shortest distance to any man's heart is his stomach, then one of the better compliments a man can give a woman is to ask for seconds.
Tom Clancy
#82. Most things in here don't react well to bullets.
Tom Clancy
#83. How strange that the only lands where he could feel something close to safe were the Christian countries of Europe, which Muslims had struggled and failed to conquer on more than one occasion. Those nations had a nearly suicidal openness to strangers,
Tom Clancy
#84. There was nothing like an appeal to honor. It was a virtue that all craved, even those who lacked it. Fundamentally, honor was itself a debt, a code of behavior, a promise, something inside yourself that you owed to the others who saw it in you.
Tom Clancy
#85. I just finished reading the Koran, and there's nothing in there I didn't hear in Sunday school.
Tom Clancy
#86. If you don't write it down - " "Then it never happened.
Tom Clancy
#87. I've made up stuff that's turned out to be real, that's the spooky part.
Tom Clancy
#89. Dominic took the bait: If the President breaks the law, then the House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate convicts him, and he's out on the street,
Tom Clancy
#90. (Stereotyping) is only for those without the imagination to see people as they are instead of being like someone else they understand.
Tom Clancy
#91. The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.
Tom Clancy
#92. Wars are begun by frightened men. They fear war, but more than that, they fear what will happen if they don't start one or take equivalent action, I suppose.
Tom Clancy
#93. Cheating was a concept both foreign and integral to the fighting of wars.
Tom Clancy
#94. We are enemies. I would as soon kill you as have dinner with you. But even enemies can negotiate, can't they, now?
Tom Clancy
#95. Can't take him up there for a short haircut." Hallston smiled coldly. "I doubt anyone
Tom Clancy
#96. 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.
Tom Clancy
#97. Time is something that fills the empty spaces of life
Tom Clancy
#98. The most important lesson that came out of Vietnam for me was that Marines take care of Marines.
Tom Clancy
#99. No man controlled his fate, a knowledge that came late in life. You just tried to muddle along from one point to another, making as few mistakes as possible.
Tom Clancy
#100. My life is a very simple life thank you
Tom Clancy
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