Tom Clancy Quotes

Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.

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.

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

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.

In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to put it on the line.

An overnight success is ten years in the making.

America is the most inventive country in the world. Why? Because everybody has access to information. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them.

I haven't got any fan mail from Osama bin Laden. I have no reason to believe he reads my stuff I'll never decide for commercial reasons to put something in that endangers our national security. You just can't do that.

When I go to peoples' houses I like to sneak into their bedrooms and try on their underwear.

Washington D.C. is about 300 square miles surrounded by realty.

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

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.

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.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

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

Bill Clinton is a man who thinks international affairs means dating a girl from out of town.

The general difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals like pretty pictures and conservatives like to build bridges that people can drive across.

Well, It's a Communist country, and the Communists do not reward personal initiative...except by execution.

Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

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..."

Helicopters don't fly, they vibrate so badly the ground rejects them.

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.

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

Victory comes only to those prepared to make it, and take it.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

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

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

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

The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny-uncultured-yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.

Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not... Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it... Because the dream is within you. No one can take your dream away.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

Surviving is much more painful than death.

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.

A lawyer is just like an attack dog, only without a conscience.

It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.

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

Learn to write the same way you learn to play golf. You do it and keep doing it until you get it right.

There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

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.

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.

Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.

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.

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

I just finished reading the Koran, and there's nothing in there I didn't hear in Sunday school.

Morituri non cognant, perhaps. Those who are about to die — just don't know.

For over two weeks, the defenders of Wake Island held off a vastly superior force of Japanese ships and troops, inspiring the whole nation with their plucky spirit and sacrifice. Unfortunately, Navy leaders at Pearl Harbor, struggling to protect what was left of the shattered Pacific Fleet, canceled a relief mission, allowing the island and its defenders to fall without support. Wake damaged the long-standing trust between the Corps and the Navy, a memory that still rankles Marines and shames sailors.

The good old days are now.

I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.