Tom Clancy quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Tom Clancy on Wise Famous Quotes.

The only person who has artistic control is the director, and 'director' is how you spell God in Hollywood.

A bureaucrat who said no to everything rarely got in trouble.

explained, finally picking

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.

Surviving is much more painful than death.

If you don't write the book, the book ain't gonna get written.

To Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Won the War.

Diplomacy was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.

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

It wasn't an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.

The human mind has a way of punishing itself for killing a fellow man. It remembers and relives the incident again and again.

Robert, that's a little too far off the wall, I think, Greer analyzed.

Therefore, it is in our mutual interests to cause unrest and chaos within America. The new American president is a weak man.

People who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions.

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

The media could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.

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

The noblest of ideas have always been protected by warriors.

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

People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.

The five hundred feet up the square-spiral staircase

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

I write strictly for fun ... as long as it stays fun I'll continue to do it.

I don't discuss works in progress ...

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

The pinnacle of power in China is the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the tiny body that sets policy for the nation's 1.4 billion citizens.

The mark of a good officer, Wegener repeatedly told his youngsters, was willingness to admit he had something yet to learn.

Success will ruin your life.

It is good that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.

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

Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds like the way people talk, then write it down.

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

Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.

Life is about learning; when you stop learning, you die.

You can always find an expert to confirm your belief, no matter how ridiculous.

What do I know about sex? I'm a married man.

The extraneous duties, in a sense, were the job.

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

You just had to apply judgment to your action, and such judgment came with experience - but experience often came from bad decisions.

Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.

Morituri Non Cognant (Those Who are About to Die, Just Don't know)

Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.

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

Probably what pushed the Russians over the edge was SDI. They realized they couldn't beat us.

Cheating was a concept both foreign and integral to the fighting of wars.

Show me an elitist, and I'll show you a loser.

The role of fiction is supposed to be divorced from the role of reality.

Mr. President. Douglas MacArthur said every military disaster can be explained in two words: 'Too late.

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,

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

You have to know the things you don't know. You have to figure out what the questions are before you can start looking for answers.

When you have stopped learning you have begun to die.

If you're really good, they'd taught him at Quantico, you don't have to be arrogant.

You couldn't allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight.

A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.

No matter what you or anyone else does, there will be someone who says that there's something bad about it.

One presidential advisor to another: If the world made sense, we'd all have to find honest work.

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.

Giving your book to Hollywood is like turning your daughter over to a pimp,

you can follow along.

The allocation of research money was a political act.

An overnight success is ten years in the making.

The three wolves didn't know that the sheep herd had three dogs in it. Big ones.

Wars are begun by frightened men.

the problem with so secure a place was that it depended absolutely on secrecy which, once blown, became a fatal liability

All history is really nothing more than the application of ideology to the past.

Under the circumstances, washing without soap wasn't even as good as kissing your sister.

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.

If you don't write it down, it never happened.
Cathy (& Jack) Ryan

good data organized effectively was the most important commodity for any analyst.

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

How strange that he should feel trapped by plans he himself had set in motion.

office just wasn't a very good place for thinking, but every executive in the world pretended it was. Christ

(Stereotyping) is only for those without the imagination to see people as they are instead of being like someone else they understand.

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

It's all about intelligence; and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap.

There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told, and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.

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.

Tears released poisons from inside, poisons which if not released could be as deadly as the real kind. The

Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud,

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

I've made up stuff that's turned out to be real, that's the spooky part.

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

Politicians are more concerned with "issues" than "principles," but talked as though the two nouns had the same meaning.

Time is something that fills the empty spaces of life

Being a victim is more palatable than having to recognize the intrinsic contradictions of one's own governing philosophy.

Marine. Say the word to any American, and you can count on a strong reaction.

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

He was carrying nothing illegal, except for that which was in his head.

At this table, a loud voice was just a man venting his stress. A quiet one was far more dangerous.

The Americans are always investigating one another, it was their national sport.

ambition on a beer budget.

Can't take him up there for a short haircut." Hallston smiled coldly. "I doubt anyone

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

Question that remained now was whether he would be alive to perform the day's final salaat. That was in Allah's

Your Highness, what do you call it when a high-ranking person lies right in your face?" the President asked with a wry smile. "Diplomacy.

Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?

If you don't write it down - " "Then it never happened.

I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.