Tom Clancy - People Quotes

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The more information a guy has, the more likely he is to say, "Hey, King Charlie, you really blew that call." That's why democracy happened. 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
I was one of the first generations to watch television. That's technology. TV is like any other kind of tool. TV exposes people to news, to information, to knowledge, to entertainment. How is it bad? Computers are going to be even bigger. TVs are one-way. You sit there and you watch it. Computers, you interact with.

Tom Clancy
Look, technology is another word for tool. There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. We got past that. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.

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 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.

Tom Clancy
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.

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
The army led America in integration... The army recognized early on that, you know, black people are pretty much the same as white people; they just tend to be a little bit darker. They make just as good soldiers.

Tom Clancy
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.

Tom Clancy
I'd rather talk to people who do things than complain about other people who do things. I say they're idiots.

Tom Clancy
About forty percent of the people vote Democrat. About forty percent vote Republican. Of those eighty percent, most wouldn't change their votes if Adolf Hitler was running against Abe Lincoln - or against FDR.... That leaves twenty percent of the people who swing back one way or another... the true independents.... That twenty percent controls the destiny of the country.

Tom Clancy
There's two kinds of people in the world, the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.

Tom Clancy
My vision for this book and the others in the series is to let people know what kind of commanders we have. You don't pick generals off park benches. … They are experts at what they do and lot of thinking goes into it. And I want to get across to people the intellectual dimension of command, to let people know that it's hard to be a general. And the people we have with general stars on their shoulders are pretty smart and pretty good guys.

Tom Clancy
I think it's going to be remembered as the last major war on planet Earth, if we're lucky, if we maintain our foreign policy properly. … It will be remembered as the last time major countries had to put people in the field and put them in harm's way. It may be the last of all human nature wars, which is a nice way to remember any kind of a war, as the last one.

Tom Clancy
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.

Tom Clancy
There are people in government who don't want other people to know what they know. It's just another example of elitism. And I spit on elitism. Show me an elitist, and I'll show you a loser.

Tom Clancy
There's been historical conflict between China and Russia for well over 1,000 years. … People forget that the Mongols came all the way to the Baltic Sea and all the way to where St. Petersburg is today … And the Russians have a good sense of history and they remember that.

Tom Clancy
People live longer today than they ever have. They live happier lives, they have more knowledge, they have more information. All this is the result of communications technology and the tools with which man has equipped himself. How is any of that bad?

Tom Clancy
Fifteen years ago, there was this country called the Soviet Union that had over 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us... they're not there anymore. That's a good thing. And when people talk about how the world is more dangerous now than it was because we had these terrorists running around, my reply is, you know, a terrorist is like a buzzing mosquito. About 15 years ago, there was a great, big vampire bat; that's several orders of magnitude different from a mosquito. So the world is much safer — a lot safer than it was. It's not perfectly safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than it was.

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
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
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
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
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