Quotes from Tom Clancy

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud

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.

To Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Won the War.

Visto despuès, podría parecer un modo extraño de empezar una guerra. Solo uno de los implicados sabía de lo que de verdad sucedía, y por casualidad

the only difference between a wise man and a fool was in the magnitude of his mistakes. To err was human, and the smarter and more powerful you were, the greater the scope of your screwup.

You have to know the things you don't know. You have to figure out what the questions are before you can start looking for answers.

It's a leadership function. They taught me that at Quantico. The troops have to see you doing the job. They have to know you're there for them." And I have to be sure that it's all real, that I actually am the President.

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

Ladies and gentlemen, it is not the job of government to be the national nanny. The average citizen can look after his or her own needs without assistance from somebody who works here in Washington.

The media could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.

people who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions.

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.

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

It wasn't an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.

The mark of a good officer, Wegener repeatedly told his youngsters, was willingness to admit he had something yet to learn.

There is more to military units than hardware. There is the character of the unit's personnel: their strengths, experience, and knowledge, their ability to get along and work together amid the horrors of the battlefield. There is an almost undefinable quality. That quality is the Marine Corps' secret weapon. Their edge. That quality is their ethos.

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.

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.

Each of a hundred ships, built by the same men at the same yard to the same plans, will have her own special characteristics--most of them bad, really, but after her crew becomes accustomed to them they are spoken of affectionately, particularly in retrospect.

Even today, the memory of Ribbon Creek influences the way new recruits are handled—not with kid gloves, but with respect for their safety and dignity. This too is part of the Marine ethos: to take care of their brother and sister Marines.

A man had to have something, he reasoned, to lose his mind in, at least once a day.

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

Yet another proof that the drafters of the Constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They'd assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they'd been. One could almost hear the "Oops!" emanating from all those old graves.

Diplomatic exchange combined the worst aspects of explaining things to a toddler and talking with a mother-in-law. It was dull, it was tedious, it was exasperating, and it was necessary.