Tom Clancy Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

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

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 difference between me and you is that I do good fiction.

Tom Clancy
The first rumors about Zenith came from the Czechoslovakians.

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've been telling people for 12 years that if you want to get a nuclear device into the United States, just bring it through the port of Miami disguised as cocaine.

Tom Clancy
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
Our tools keep getting better, and as a result of that, our lives keep getting better.

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

Tom Clancy
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
A field commander never has the information he needs. He has to go with his best hunch. The more information he has, the easier it is for him to win the battle.

Tom Clancy
"Rainbow Six" was sort of a spinoff of one my books, which did pretty well. … Interestingly enough, I never play the games. I just sort of — it's more fun for me to help formulate them than it is to play them.

Tom Clancy
I'm a spy... I worked for the CIA 15 years. The cover was I worked for the insurance business.

Tom Clancy
No matter what you or anyone else does, there will be someone who says that there's something bad about it. 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
The hard part is discriminating between factual reporting and journalistic fiction. Last year at the National Press Club I said out loud and in public [C-SPAN was there] that the difference between me and a lot of reporters is that I do good fiction. Some were polite enough to chuckle.

Tom Clancy
The thing you have to understand about fighter pilots is they never quite grow past the stage of little boys buzzing past girls on their bicycles.

Tom Clancy
Ending your own life is not something the average person does. Everybody's assuming these are Islamic terrorists. Well, if so they've defiled their own religion. Islam does not permit suicide. It says you go to hell if you do something like this... We saw people in Northern Ireland, Catholics acting like savages and Protestants acting like savages... We have people who call themselves Muslims acting like savages. It's not because of their religion, it's because they're fools.

Tom Clancy
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
Countries that do not control knowledge and information tend to do better because the average guy who is exposed to a lot of information can get ideas and profit from them.

Tom Clancy
The People's Republic of China is still a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist nation. So, you know, communism is still involved there. They haven't figured their way out of that particularly ideological box yet and that's their misfortune.

Tom Clancy
Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn't have to. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Your spouse and children need not get in its way, because the dream is within you. No one can take your dream away.

Tom Clancy
The average guy is fairly smart, if you give him the ability to make decisions for himself. That's the whole premise of America, and that's why America has prospered, and it prospers because if the average guy can get information, he can make his own decisions.

Tom Clancy
Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle. Take the AEGIS system in the navy. It's a radar computer system for air-battle management. What it does is give the commander an extra 15 minutes to decide what he's going to do to fight a battle, and those 15 minutes are decisively important.

Tom Clancy
"If a hero must have an unmarked grave, it should at least be close to where his comrades fell."
"Comrades?"
"One way or another we all fight for the things we believe in. Doesn't that give us some common ground?"

Tom Clancy
Historically, anything that gets information to people is good for the world. The most important human being who ever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around. Anything that gets information to people is good. America has prospered because we're the most information-friendly society in the world.

Tom Clancy
The average guy is smart enough to know the difference between what works and what doesn't, and if you have bad information, sooner or later, you figure it out and you get onto something else.

Tom Clancy
That's the ultimate pornography... There's nothing more pornographic than glorifying war.

Tom Clancy
China has a lot of people and not enough space and the Russians have not too many people and a lot of space.

Tom Clancy
Certainly, we live in a different world … for the first time in all of known human history, we live in a world absent of the likelihood of superpower conflict. Now we live in a world in which there are superpowers, but we're not butting heads all the time. That's a very good thing for the world... but... there's still a few bad guys out there.

Tom Clancy
What underclass? I mean you know, what underclass? Do you know any of them? Do they have automobiles? Most of them probably do. Do most of them have television sets? Do most of them have telephones? Well, if they can afford automobiles, they can afford computers. And since they have television sets, they already have access to communications technology. And since they have telephones, they can talk to one another. Wherein are they deprived?

Tom Clancy