Top 200 Tom Clancy Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Even true believers had consciences, Too bad.”

— Tom Clancy

102. “The three wolves didn’t know that the sheep herd had three dogs in it. Big ones.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

104. “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

105. “Specifically, they’d used genetic material from colon cancer, one of the more robust strains, and the results had been striking. The.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

107. “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

108. “What backed the money was not gold or something of intrinsic value, but rather the collective belief that money had value because it had to have such value.”

— Tom Clancy

109. “Robert, that’s a little too far off the wall, I think,” Greer analyzed.”

— Tom Clancy

110. “Not every story started off big enough to notice.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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112. “The most important lesson that came out of Vietnam for me was that Marines take care of Marines.”

— Tom Clancy

113. “Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.”

— Tom Clancy

114. “We sink ships and try to pretend that they’re just ships – things without people in them. It’s dishonest, but we do it anyway.”

— Tom Clancy

115. “Confusion is the ally of the prepared.”

— Tom Clancy

116. “When you dealt with explosives, you didn’t rush and you didn’t take chances.”

— Tom Clancy

117. “What am I supposed to do about you?”

— Tom Clancy

118. “Like many weak men, he made a great ceremony of personal strength and power.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

120. “You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears.” – Winston Churchill.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

123. “It was so strange, how much fear there was in the world, and the most fearful of all were so often those who held the power in their hands.”

— Tom Clancy

124. “How strange, Popov thought. If the Irish didn’t like the English, then why did they emulate their driving patterns?”

— Tom Clancy

125. “It is time my brothers.“Tolkaze handed the AK-47 rifle and ammo belt to his taller friend.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

136. “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

137. “He was a person whose universe was very small indeed. It held only one person, himself, surrounded by things whose sole function was to be manipulated for his amusement or profit.”

— Tom Clancy

138. “Danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

141. “A trend was a trend only because people thought it so. And in thinking it so, they made it so.”

— Tom Clancy

142. “History admires the wise, but it elevates the brave. – EDMUND MORRIS.”

— Tom Clancy

143. “Clifford Rutledge II was the perfect diplomat. He believed in little beyond his own career, some vague notions of international amity, and his personal ability to make it come about and to avoid war through the sheer force of his brilliance.”

— Tom Clancy

144. “The Kealty administration had promised more “openness” and “transparency” in the clandestine CIA. Jack Junior’s father had written an op-ed in The Washington Post that suggested, in a manner that was still respectful to the office of the presidency, that Ed Kealty might want to look up the word clandestine in the dictionary.”

— Tom Clancy

145. “Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.”

— Tom Clancy

146. “Liberation and equal-rights issues notwithstanding, it was a man’s job to make a woman feel cherished and respected.”

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

148. “Biryukov continued, “Roman Talanov, my counterpart in the FSB, is leading this charge. I suppose with complete control over Russian intelligence activity abroad, he can expand his influence and begin destabilizing nations beyond the near abroad. Russia will invade Ukraine, probably within the next few weeks. They will annex the Crimea. From there, if they meet no resistance from the West, they will take more of the country, all the way to the Dnieper River.”

— Tom Clancy

149. “Yes,’ Smirnov answered, ’he was on a nuclear-powered submarine.”

— Tom Clancy

150. “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.”

— Tom Clancy