Tom Clancy: Thing

Tom Clancy was American author. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
Tom Clancy: 166   quotes 1   like

“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

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)
Context: 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.

War , People , Fight

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

Tom Clancy book The Hunt for Red October

Source: The Hunt for Red October

Thinking

“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

1990s, CNN interview (1999)

Girl , Boy , Understanding , Past

“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

2000s, CNN interview (2000)

World , Guy , History , Time

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

Tom Clancy

1990s

Hope , Idea , Change

“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 book Executive Orders

Executive Orders (1996), p. 613
1990s

Sex , Change

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

Tom Clancy

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)

People

“Fifteen years ago, there was this country called the Soviet Union that had over 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us… they're not there anymore. That's a good thing. And when people talk about how the world is more dangerous now than it was because we had these terrorists running around, my reply is, you know, a terrorist is like a buzzing mosquito. About 15 years ago, there was a great, big vampire bat; that's several orders of magnitude different from a mosquito. So the world is much safer — a lot safer than it was. It's not perfectly safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than it was.”

Tom Clancy

2000s, Larry King Live (2000)

People , World , Country

“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

Interview with Don Swaim (1986)
1980s

World , Way , Training

“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

2000s, Larry King Live (2000)

Books , World

“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 book Debt of Honor

Debt of Honor (1994), ch. 5
1990s

Art

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

Tom Clancy book The Cardinal of the Kremlin

Jack Ryan and MG Dalmatov, SA; The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), p. 796
1980s

Way , Fight