Quotes from Executive Orders

“To Ronald Wilson Regan, The Fortieth President of The United States: The Man Who Won The War.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“To Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Won the War.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“Your Highness, what do you call it when a high-ranking person lies right in your face?” the President asked with a wry smile. “Diplomacy.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“Diplomacy "was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“The media "could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“All history is really nothing more than the application of ideology to the past.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“It wasn't an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“If the First Toddler wears it, it has to be fashionable.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“It’s going to be hard writing for you. I can’t dip into the usual well. I have to learn to write the way I used to like to write, not the way I’m paid to write,”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“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.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“thing, most deadly of all to those who hold it in their earthly hands. For yourself, you must decide. What sort of leader do you wish to be, and with what other leaders”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“A bureaucrat who said no to everything rarely got in trouble.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“It is good that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“How strange that he should feel trapped by plans he himself had set in motion.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“Reporters called down every other profession—medicine, law, politics—for failing to meet a level of professional responsibility which they would allow no one to enforce on themselves, and which they themselves would too rarely enforce on their own. Do as I say, not as I do was something you couldn’t say to a six-year-old, but it had become a ready cant for grown-ups. And if it got any worse, then what?”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“Not every story started off big enough to notice.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“The extraneous duties, in a sense, were the job.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“A rare academic (was) a man who knew what he didn't know.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“He was carrying nothing illegal, except for that which was in his head.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“Everything was politics, and politics was ideology, and ideology came down to personal prejudices rather than the quest for truth.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“They loved their country largely because they controlled it.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“THERE IS NO such thing as magic. That was merely the word people used to explain something so cleverly done that there was no ready explanation for it, and the simplest technique employed by its practitioners was to distract the audience with one moving and obvious hand (usually in a white glove) while the other was doing something else.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“Actually there are,” the President said, after a moment’s reflection. “The problem is that they never come here to work. You know who I learned that from? Cathy,” Jack told him. “She fucks up, somebody goes blind, but she can’t run away from making the call, can she? Imagine, you fuck up, and somebody loses his sight forever—or dies. The guys who work the emergency room are really on the ragged edge, like when Cathy and Sally went into Shock-Trauma. You blow the call, and somebody is gone forever. Big deal, George, bigger than trading equities like we used to do. Same thing with cops. Same thing with soldiers. You have to make the call, right now, or something really bad happens. But those kinds of people don’t come here to Washington, do they? And mainly that sort of guy goes to the place he—or she—has to be, where the real action is,” Ryan said, almost wistfully. “The really good ones go where they’re needed, and they always seem to know where that is.” “But the really good ones don’t like the bullshit. So they don’t come here?” Winston asked, getting his own course in Government 101, and finding Ryan a teacher of note. “Some do. Adler at State. Another guy over there I’ve discovered, name of Vasco. But those are the ones who buck the system. The system works against them. Those are the ones we have to identify and protect. Mostly little ones, but what they do isn’t little. They keep the system running, and mainly they go unnoticed because they don’t care much about being noticed. They care about getting it done, serving the people out there. You know what I’d really like to do?” Ryan asked, for the first time revealing something from the depths of his soul. He hadn’t even had the guts to say this to Arnie.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“hadn’t even had the guts to say this to Arnie. “Yeah, set up a system that really works, a system that recognizes the good ones and gives them what they deserve. You know how hard that is in any organization? Hell, it was a struggle at my shop, and Treasury has more janitors than I had trading executives. I’m not even sure where to start a job like that,” Winston said. He would be one to grasp the scope of the dream, his President thought. “Harder than you think, even. The guys who really do the work don’t want to be bosses. They want to work. Cathy could be an administrator. They offered her the chair at the University of Virginia Medical School—and that would have been a big deal. But it would have cut her patient time in half, and she likes doing what she does. Someday Bernie Katz at Hopkins is going to retire, and they’ll offer his chair to her, and she’ll turn that down. Probably,” Jack thought. “Unless I can talk her out of it.” “Can’t be done, Jack.” TRADER shook his head. “Hell of an idea, though.” “Grover Cleveland reformed the Civil Service over a hundred years ago,” POTUS reminded his breakfast guest. “I know we can’t make it perfect, but we can make it better. You’re already trying—you just told me that. Think about it some.” “I’ll do that,” SecTreas promised, standing. “But for now, I have another revolution to foment. How many enemies can we afford to make?” “There’s always enemies, George. Jesus had enemies.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“The allocation of research money was a political act.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

“When the French high command had got wind of the German Schlieffen Plan prior to World War I, their reaction had been, “So much the better for us!” That assault had barely ground to a halt outside Paris. In 1940, the same high command had greeted initial news of another German attack with smiles—and that attack had ended at the Spanish border. The problem was that people tended to wed their ideas more faithfully than their spouses, and the tendency was universal. It”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Executive Orders

About the author

Popular quotes

“It didn't help that she was painfully shy and kept to herself, because then they just thought she was stuck-up, which she wasn't. She was just quiet.”
― Melissa de la Cruz, quote from Blue Bloods

“Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.”
― Jonathan Stroud, quote from The Amulet of Samarkand

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, quote from The Goldfinch

“You couldn't just pick and choose at will when someone depended on you, or loved you. It wasn't like a light switch, easy to turn on or off. If you were in, you were in. Out, you were out.”
― Sarah Dessen, quote from Along for the Ride

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.