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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

""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."

"Historically, anything that gets information to people is good for the world. The most important human being who ever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around. Anything that gets information to people is good. America has prospered because we're the most information-friendly society in the world."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else."

"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."

"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."

"Wenn man Regierungsbeamten vorschlägt, einmal über den eigenen Tellerrand hinauszublicken, nehmen sie einfach einen größeren Teller."

"Verbohrte Ideologen hatten nämlich häufig Probleme mit der Wirklichkeit, vor allem dann, wenn diese mit ihren Vorstellungen nicht übereinstimmen wollte."

"Es sind immer verängstigte Männer, die Kriege anzetteln. Mehr als einen Krieg selbst fürchten sie, was geschehen könnte, wenn sie auf Krieg oder andere Gewaltmittel verzichten würden."

"Die Talente machen die Arbeit, und die Marktschreier bestimmen wo's lang geht."

"Denke, wie dein Feind denkt, und fall ihm auf diese Weise in den Arm. In der Theorie klang das gut und einfach. In der Praxis lagen die Dinge jedoch meist ganz anders."

"Anwälte sind der Untergang Amerikas, und aller zivilisierter Nationen."