Top 200 Tom Clancy Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “A wise man knows his limitations.’ And a bold one seizes opportunities.”

— Tom Clancy

52. “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.”

— Tom Clancy

53. “There are only two ways we can be beaten: we die or we give up. And we’re not giving up.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

57. “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

58. “I inherited curiosity from my Dad.”

— Tom Clancy

59. “The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest.”

— Tom Clancy

60. “It was realism that told Kelly he couldn’t fix all the problems of the world; it was idealism that told him his inability to do so did not preclude him from addressing individual imperfections.”

— Tom Clancy

61. “It’s not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.”

— Tom Clancy

62. “Everyone knew Russia’s ambitions extended to the Crimea, but a few years earlier some steam was let out of the kettle when the pro-nationalist Ukrainian president was replaced by a pro-Russian successor. The fate of the Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol seemed secure, and Russia went about its business.”

— Tom Clancy

63. “People live longer today than they ever have. They live happier lives, have more knowledge, more information. All this is the result of communications technology. How is any of that bad?”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

65. “You can act like a policeman or a soldier, but not both.”

— Tom Clancy

66. “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

67. “There was nothing like an appeal to honor. It was a virtue that all craved, even those who lacked it. Fundamentally, honor was itself a debt, a code of behavior, a promise, something inside yourself that you owed to the others who saw it in you.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

71. “She didn’t strike me as a “crossword in ink” kind of girl.”

— Tom Clancy

72. “I haven’t got any fan mail from Osama bin Laden. I have no reason to believe he reads my stuff I’ll never decide for commercial reasons to put something in that endangers our national security. You just can’t do that.”

— Tom Clancy

73. “I think it’s an intellectual duty for a person who lives in a free society to read material not only with which you agree, but with which you disagree. Because every so often somebody you think is wrong will actually turn out to be right.”

— Tom Clancy

74. “One of the compensations for wearing a uniform and earning less money than an equally talented man can make in the real world is the off chance of being killed.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

77. “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.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

79. “America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information.”

— Tom Clancy

80. “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.”

— Tom Clancy

81. “Suspense is achieved by information control: What you know. What the reader knows. What the characters know.”

— Tom Clancy

82. “Once you stop believing in Santa Claus, the whole world just goes downhill.”

— Tom Clancy

83. “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

84. “Courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits.”

— Tom Clancy

85. “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.”

— Tom Clancy

86. “The human condition today is better than it’s ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

88. “Surviving is much more painful than death.”

— Tom Clancy

89. “Daughters, he told himself, were God’s revenge on you for being a man: you lived in mortal fear that they might accidentally encounter somebody like – yourself at that age.”

— Tom Clancy

90. “Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost- and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they?”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

93. “Success will ruin your life.”

— Tom Clancy

94. “I remember when Deng said, ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.’ To which Mao responded with a livid snarl: ‘What emperor said that?”

— Tom Clancy

95. “What do I know about sex? I’m a married man.”

— Tom Clancy

96. “Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if “X” happened? That’s how you start.”

— Tom Clancy

97. “That’s the ultimate pornography There’s nothing more pornographic than glorifying war.”

— Tom Clancy

98. “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.”

— Tom Clancy

99. “Probably what pushed the Russians over the edge was SDI. They realized they couldn’t beat us.”

— Tom Clancy

100. “The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.”

— Tom Clancy