Top 200 Tom Clancy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The good old days are now.”

— Tom Clancy

3. “Beware the fury of a patient man.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

5. “An overnight success is ten years in the making.”

— Tom Clancy

6. “If you want to kick the tiger in his ass you’d better have a plan for dealing with his teeth.”

— Tom Clancy

7. “Life is about learning; when you stop learning, you die.”

— Tom Clancy

8. “I know I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

11. “Keep at it! The one talent that’s indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story.”

— Tom Clancy

12. “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

— Tom Clancy

13. “Bad money drives out good.’ That means poor performance will take over if good performance isn’t recognized.”

— Tom Clancy

14. “There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

17. “Every person you meet – and everything you do in life – is an opportunity to learn something.”

— Tom Clancy

18. “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 it away.”

— Tom Clancy

19. “The Only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.”

— Tom Clancy

Featured in: Reading Quotes

20. “We cannot fail to win unless we fail to try.”

— Tom Clancy

21. “My life is a very simple life thank you.”

— Tom Clancy

22. “Helicopters don’t fly, they vibrate so badly the ground rejects them.”

— Tom Clancy

23. “A conscience is the price of morality, and morality is the price of civilization.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

25. “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

26. “The smaller the mind, the greater the ego.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

28. “Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

31. “There is a long and honorable tradition of citizens in service to their nation that goes back at least as far as Cincinnatus, the Roman citizen who, more than once answered his country’s call, then returned to his farm and his family and his work.”

— Tom Clancy

Featured in: Country Quotes

32. “There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.”

— Tom Clancy

33. “Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.”

— Tom Clancy

34. “Switzerland is a land where crime is virtually unknown, yet most Swiss males are required by law to keep in their homes what amounts to a portable, personal machine gun.”

— Tom Clancy

35. “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.”

— Tom Clancy

36. “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud, Foley thought.”

— Tom Clancy

37. “Anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can’t hate black people anymore, of course, and you can’t hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.”

— Tom Clancy

38. “War is the ultimate criminal act, an armed robbery writ large. And it’s always about greed. It’s always a nation that wants something another nation has. And you defeat that nation by recognizing what it wants and denying it to them.”

— Tom Clancy

39. “It is a principle of diplomacy that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.”

— Tom Clancy

40. “Show me an elitist, and I’ll show you a loser.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

42. “It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

45. “I’d rather talk to people who do things than complain about other people who do things. I say they’re idiots.”

— Tom Clancy

46. “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

47. “When you have stopped learning you have begun to die.”

— Tom Clancy

48. “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.”

— Tom Clancy

49. “I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you’re immortal.”

— Tom Clancy

50. “If you don’t write the book, the book ain’t gonna get written.”

— Tom Clancy