Quotes from Executive Orders

Tom Clancy ·  1273 pages

Rating: (40K votes)


“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

Tom Clancy
Born place: in Baltimore County, Maryland, The United States
Born date April 12, 1947
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