Tom Clancy Quotes

If you give people a firm opinion, you run the risk of being wrong. Guess what? People remember when you’re wrong a lot more often than when you’re right. So the tendency is to include all the possibilities. It’s intellectually honest, even.

Sandra O'Toole walked back to the nurses' station, remembering what she alone had seen. Kelly's face turning so white that her first reaction to it was that he must be in shock, then the tumult behind her as she reached for her patient — but then what?

It wasn't like the first time at all. Kelly's face has transformed itself. Only an instant, like opening a door into some other place, and she'd seen something she had never imagined. Something very old and feral and ugly. The eyes not wide, but focused on something she could not see. The pallor of his face not that of shock, but of rage. His hands balled briefly into fists of quivering stone. And then his face had changed again. There had been comprehension to replace the blind, killing rage, and what she'd seen next was the most dangerous sight she had ever beheld, though she knew not why. Then the door closed, Kelly's eyes shut, and when he opened them, his face was unnaturally serene. The complete sequence had not taken four seconds, she realized, all of it while Rosen and Douglas had been scuffling against the wall. He'd passed from horror to rage to understanding — then to concealment, but what had come in between comprehension and disguise was the most frightening thing of all.

What had she seen in the face of this man? It took her a moment to answer the question. Death was what she'd seen. Controlled. Planned. Disciplined.

But it was still Death, living in the mind of a man.

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

In case you haven't noticed, we live in a world that is for the first time in all of recorded human history unlikely to have a major war. There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. The reason is our technology was better than theirs. Probably what pushed the Russians over the edge was SDI. It was really a combination of SDI and CNN. They realized they couldn't beat us so they decided to change the ball game.

Jack Ryan said, “Benjamin Franklin put it like this: ‘Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

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,

Surviving is much more painful than death.

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.

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.

[...] The image superimposed on Ricci's field of view by his visor display showed a pair of guards in hooded parkas, goggles, and wool scarves taking relaxed strides along their patrol of the building's north side. Their shoulder-slung FN P90 assault weapons fired the same ammunition as his FN Five-seveN pistol: small rounds, big punch. [...]

"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.

In a toxic, festering sort o' way...

When the first mission of Rainbow Six was actually coming together we really started to realize that we might have a hit on our hands, but hadn't really expected the runaway success.

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

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.