People From Baltimore

"As Duke Ellington once said, "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton." [...] About that Wellington guy, I wouldn't know. Ellington, yes. As for that Eton business — well, I married my first wife in Elkton, and I always hated the place. It musta stuck."

"What the hell has Hoover got to do with it? Anyway, I had a better year than he did."

"Say, if I hadn't been sick last summer, I'd have broken hell out of that home run record! Besides, the President gets a four-year contract. I'm only asking for three.✱"

"My idea of a real ball player is the fellow who can take the bad breaks with a grin and come up fighting is the type I mean. A slump doesn't bother Tony any. He don't like them any more than the rest of us—but when one comes he just gets sore and fights his way out of it. And that's what it takes to make a ball player. is that sort and so is . I've seen Meusel go through 10 or 12 games without a hit, and be fighting just as hard and swinging just as hard as he did from the start. And that's the spirit that wins."

"Of course I'm not kidding myself. My recent illness proved to me that I've reached the place now where I've got to take particularly good care of myself. A lot of the boys have been kidding me because they said that illness "scared me to death." Frankly it did scare me and I'm still scared. I hope to stay scared to the point where I never forget that taking care of myself is the most important thing in my life from now on."

"My answer to that [i.e. the question of whether Ruth hoped to set a new single-season HR record] was "No." I don't believe I can ever better my 60 mark that I made in 1927. And, frankly, I don't believe anyone else will beat it for a long time either."

"Before I'm through with the big leagues I've got three more ambitions I'd like to realize. [...] I'd like to hit 500 home runs before I end my big league career. And I ought to do it easily. I already have 480 in regular season games. [...] Another is to play in 10 World Series before I quit. And that's one I think I will realize too. I've already been in nine. [...] The third one had the boys guessing. The newspaper man guessed and guessed and never hit upon it. As a matter of fact, it hasn't anything to do with baseball records at all. Maybe I'll realize it and maybe I won't. But my third ambition is to play at least one season at a salary of $100,000 a year. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that now to boost my game and I'm not out with any announcement of my demands. I've played with Colonel Ruppert a long time and we've never had any serious disagreements. I know that if I can show him that I'm worth that much money, he'll give it to me. And I'm out to show him. Understand it's strictly up to me. And I mention it here simply because of the question the newspaper man asked me and the answer I gave him."

"After all, there's only one answer to be made to the young fellow who is asking constantly for advice as to how to hit. The answer is: "Pick out a good one and sock it!" I've talked to a lot of pretty good hitters in the past ten years and I've watched them work. Go over the list from top to bottom—Hornsby, Goslin, Heilmann, Gehrig, Traynor, Cobb, Judge, Bottomley, Roush—there's not a "guess" hitter in the lot. They all tell you the same thing "I never think about whether it's a curve or a fast one that's coming. I simply get set—and if the ball looks good, I sock it.""

"That kid sure can bust 'em."

"Well, I had tried out a few schemes of my own, until one day I began to watch Joe Jackson. He looked to me about the freest, longest hitter I had seen anywhere. He could take a good, natural cut at the ball without losing his balance and when he landed the ball usually kept going until it disappeared. If you will remember, he was the first to hit one over the right field stands at the Polo Grounds. So I said to myself: If that style works so well with Jackson, why not for me? And I began keeping my right foot well forward and my left foot well back. In the first place, being a left-handed hitter, this gave me a chance to get in a lot of leverage and to get my full weight back of the punch. It brought my body around in a half turn and as I stepped into the ball with my right foot I was turning in a natural way in the same direction my bat was traveling. I tried this idea out; it worked great—and I've stuck to it ever since."

"They can boo and hoot me all they want. That doesn't matter to me. But when a fan calls insulting names from the grandstand and becomes abusive I don't intend to stand for it. This fellow today, whoever he was, called me a low-down bum and other names that got me mad, and when I went after him he ran. Furthermore, I didn't throw any dust in Hildebrand's face. It didn't go into his face, only on his sleeve. I don't know what they will do to me for this. Maybe I'll be fined or suspended for kicking on the decision, but I don't see why I should get any punishment at all. I would go into the stands again if I had to."

"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."

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

"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."

"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?"

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"In case you haven't noticed, we live in a world that is for the first time in all of recorded human history unlikely to have a major war. There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. The reason is our technology was better than theirs. Probably what pushed the Russians over the edge was SDI. It was really a combination of SDI and CNN. They realized they couldn't beat us so they decided to change the ball game."

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

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

"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."

"Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?"

"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."

"If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novels."

"Tom Clancy Treated Like He's Some Kind Of Terrorism Expert"

"Clancy's got a very simple view of the world. Good versus evil. Evil seems to get the upper hand. Good triumphs with vastly superior automatic weapons!"

"Ansara was sprinting up the tunnel, increasing the gap, but Moore was beginning to slow as he heard the thundering boots of men coming down the staircase behind them. He stopped, spun around, and dropped onto his belly as, lit by the flickering light from the tunnel entrance, a figure rushed forward, arm extended. For just a heartbeat Moore glimpsed his assailant's face: the cartel truck's driver. Propped up on his elbows now, Moore fired once into the figure's chest, the round booting him sideways into the panels before he fell onto his back. From behind him came two more men, the rest of the weapons-transfer crew, their Belgian-made cop-killer pistols flashing, the shots booming through the tunnel as one 5.7x28-millimeter round struck the pipe near Moore's elbow."

"I don't discuss works in progress..."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

""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."

"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."