Tom Clancy

In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to put it on the line.

— Tom Clancy

The objective of a terrorist is to create political change in the society he targets.

— Tom Clancy

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

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

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

— Tom Clancy

The odds against becoming the next Frederick Forsythe are, of course, somewhere between merely exponential and astronomical-incredible. I’ll settle for a book-jacket with my name on it.

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

I like writing. It's the most fun I've ever had at anything. You can build your own little world and — like a kid with his toy trains, — except instead of trains I have tanks and ships and airplanes and things... I get to make them do all the things I want them to do, and if I don't like the way things work out, I start again.

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

If a hero must have an unmarked grave, it should at least be close to where his comrades fell." "One way or another we all fight for the things we believe in. Doesn't that give us some common ground?

— Tom Clancy

There's two kinds of people in the world, the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn't have to. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Your spouse and children need not get in its way, because the dream is within you. No one can take your dream away.

— Tom Clancy

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

Back then "cruel and unusual punishment" meant the rack and burning at the stake — both of those things that had been used in pre-Revolutionary America — but in more recent rulings it has been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons.

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

The difference between me and you is that I do good fiction.

— Tom Clancy

Democracy is spreading across the world. Democracy is only possible with easy access to information and good communications. And technology is a way of facilitating communications.

— Tom Clancy

Look, this is simple. The good old days are now. OK? The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.

— Tom Clancy

What underclass? I mean you know, what underclass? Do you know any of them? Do they have automobiles? Most of them probably do. Do most of them have television sets? Do most of them have telephones? Well, if they can afford automobiles, they can afford computers. And since they have television sets, they already have access to communications technology. And since they have telephones, they can talk to one another. Wherein are they deprived?

— Tom Clancy

Look, technology is another word for tool. There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. We got past that. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.

— Tom Clancy

Our tools keep getting better, and as a result of that, our lives keep getting better.

— Tom Clancy

People live longer today than they ever have. They live happier lives, they have more knowledge, they have more information. All this is the result of communications technology and the tools with which man has equipped himself. How is any of that bad?

— Tom Clancy

I was one of the first generations to watch television. That's technology. TV is like any other kind of tool. TV exposes people to news, to information, to knowledge, to entertainment. How is it bad? Computers are going to be even bigger. TVs are one-way. You sit there and you watch it. Computers, you interact with.

— Tom Clancy

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

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

— Tom Clancy

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. Take the AEGIS system in the navy. It's a radar computer system for air-battle management. What it does is give the commander an extra 15 minutes to decide what he's going to do to fight a battle, and those 15 minutes are decisively important.

— Tom Clancy

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.

— Tom Clancy

The more information a guy has, the more likely he is to say, "Hey, King Charlie, you really blew that call." That's why democracy happened. 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

The good old days are now.

— Tom Clancy

Countries that do not control knowledge and information tend to do better because the average guy who is exposed to a lot of information can get ideas and profit from them.

— Tom Clancy

America is the most inventive country in the world. Why? Because everybody has access to information. 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. The more information available to the average person, the greater the synergy that develops from it.

— Tom Clancy

There are people in government who don't want other people to know what they know. It's just another example of elitism. And I spit on elitism. Show me an elitist, and I'll show you a loser.

— Tom Clancy

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.

— Tom Clancy

The thing you have to understand about fighter pilots is they never quite grow past the stage of little boys buzzing past girls on their bicycles.

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

I think it's going to be remembered as the last major war on planet Earth, if we're lucky, if we maintain our foreign policy properly. … It will be remembered as the last time major countries had to put people in the field and put them in harm's way. It may be the last of all human nature wars, which is a nice way to remember any kind of a war, as the last one.

— Tom Clancy

[...] 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. [...]

— Tom Clancy

The hard part is discriminating between factual reporting and journalistic fiction. Last year at the National Press Club I said out loud and in public [C-SPAN was there] that the difference between me and a lot of reporters is that I do good fiction. Some were polite enough to chuckle.

— Tom Clancy

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

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

My wife will tell you I'm practically addicted to the History Channel … and I read a lot of history.

— Tom Clancy

There's been historical conflict between China and Russia for well over 1,000 years. … People forget that the Mongols came all the way to the Baltic Sea and all the way to where St. Petersburg is today … And the Russians have a good sense of history and they remember that.

— Tom Clancy

China has a lot of people and not enough space and the Russians have not too many people and a lot of space.

— Tom Clancy

Certainly, we live in a different world … for the first time in all of known human history, we live in a world absent of the likelihood of superpower conflict. Now we live in a world in which there are superpowers, but we're not butting heads all the time. That's a very good thing for the world... but... there's still a few bad guys out there.

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

America is a country with a First Amendment, and you're allowed to publish just about anything you want, as long as it's not real secret information. Of course, nobody really does that except for, you know, you guys in the media.

— Tom Clancy

There are things I know I know about I don't write about, which I could not responsibly put into my books. Interestingly enough, though, the scariest one of those things is not classified at all. But nevertheless, I don't write about it, because it would make the world a somewhat more dangerous place.

— Tom Clancy

The People's Republic of China is still a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist nation. So, you know, communism is still involved there. They haven't figured their way out of that particularly ideological box yet and that's their misfortune.

— Tom Clancy

"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.

— Tom Clancy

The average guy is smart enough to know the difference between what works and what doesn't, and if you have bad information, sooner or later, you figure it out and you get onto something else.

— Tom Clancy

The average guy is fairly smart, if you give him the ability to make decisions for himself. That's the whole premise of America, and that's why America has prospered, and it prospers because if the average guy can get information, he can make his own decisions.

— Tom Clancy

The Soviet Union is dead and gone and replaced by the Russian Federation, which is a country we can be friends with now, thank God — and we want the Russians to prosper, and should help the Russians prosper in every way we can within reason.

— Tom Clancy

If you want to tell me I'm a bum, that's okay.

— Tom Clancy

The military has always been a very introspective organization... One of the reasons why the army is so progressive is its always examining itself. The army is always looking for better ways to do its job.

— Tom Clancy

The army led America in integration... The army recognized early on that, you know, black people are pretty much the same as white people; they just tend to be a little bit darker. They make just as good soldiers.

— Tom Clancy

These are our kids... They're good kids... Joining the army or the Marine Corps does not make you into a crypto-alcoholic Nazi, it makes you into a child of America who is doing a job for his country... Those are our kids... They're our kids.

— Tom Clancy

There's nothing that's ever happened in the world that didn't start in one human mind.

— Tom Clancy

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

I've been telling people for 12 years that if you want to get a nuclear device into the United States, just bring it through the port of Miami disguised as cocaine.

— Tom Clancy

I wanted a different way in which to tell my stories. Coming up with concepts for computer games gives me another avenue of creative expression. It's not just me telling the story, it's me designing the idea for a story and letting the players write their own ending.

— Tom Clancy

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.

— Tom Clancy

To truly feel like we're fighting terrorism, we need as much intelligence and infiltration as possible into known rivals of democracy. Once that information is collected, a sincere commitment must be made to thwart their effects through unified/joint military resolve.

— Tom Clancy

I don't discuss works in progress...

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy

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

— Tom Clancy