Quotes from Without Remorse

Tom Clancy ·  750 pages

Rating: (52.3K votes)


“The nice thing about enemies is you know where they stand. This is not always true of friends."

--General Sergey Voloshin”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of
him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation.
Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew
different parts of the whole story,
but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate
fragments of what had ...once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder
about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“Sandra O'Toole walked back to the nurses' station, remembering what she alone had seen. Kelly's face turning so white that her first reaction to it was that he must be in shock, then the tumult behind her as she reached for her patient -- but then what?

It wasn't like the first time at all. Kelly's face has transformed itself. Only an instant, like opening a door into some other place, and she'd seen something she had never imagined. Something very old and feral and ugly. The eyes not wide, but focused on something she could not see. The pallor of his face not that of shock, but of rage. His hands balled briefly into fists of quivering stone. And then his face had changed again. There had been comprehension to replace the blind, killing rage, and what she'd seen next was the most dangerous sight she had ever beheld, though she knew not why. Then the door closed, Kelly's eyes shut, and when he opened them, his face was unnaturally serene. The complete sequence had not taken four seconds, she realized, all of it while Rosen and Douglas had been scuffling against the wall. He'd passed from horror to rage to understanding -- then to concealment, but what had come in between comprehension and disguise was the most frightening thing of all.

What had she seen in the face of this man? It took her a moment to answer the question. Death was what she'd seen. Controlled. Planned. Disciplined.

But it was still Death, living in the mind of a man.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“Sandy and her community fought against a thing, and fought bravely, risking their sanity in resisting the actions of forces whose root causes they could not directly address. Kelly and his fought against people, leaving the actions of their enemies to others, but able to seek them out and fight directly against their foe, even eliminating them if they were lucky. One side had absolute purity of purpose but lacked satisfaction. The other could attain the satisfaction of destroying the enemy, but only at the cost of becoming too much like what they struggled against.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse



“If the shortest distance to any man’s heart is his stomach, then one of the better compliments a man can give a woman is to ask for seconds.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“the problem with so secure a place was that it depended absolutely on secrecy which, once blown, became a fatal liability”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“What am I supposed to do about you?”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“not a very nice place is it?" rosen asked as they came back for the last load.
"they say there's a hundred different kinds of snake there. ninety-nine are poisonous."
"and the other one?"
kelly handed a carton over to the doctor. "that one eats your ass whole.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“Tears released poisons from inside, poisons which if not released could be as deadly as the real kind. The”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse



“Hmm. Kelly finished off his Coke. That confirmed his suspicion about Oreza’s little visit. So things were getting complicated now, but they’d been pretty complicated the week before, too. He headed off to the bedroom, almost there when there came a knock at the door. That startled him rather badly, but he had to answer it. He’d opened windows to air the apartment out, and it was plain that someone was here. He took a deep breath and opened the door.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“It was realism that told Kelly he couldn’t fix all the problems of the world; it was idealism that told him his inability to do so did not preclude him from addressing individual imperfections.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“He was a person whose universe was very small indeed. It held only one person, himself, surrounded by things whose sole function was to be manipulated for his amusement or profit.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“no man who could rationalize the death of a child could truly be called a man at all,”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse


“The dead were gone and didn't know or care what they left behind.. If the dead still lived on the surface of this earth then it was in the minds of those who remembered them... Pg 736”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse



About the author

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

“There cannot be any hard and fast rules. But there can be suggestions and useful analogies. The most useful, to my mind, is that of the difference between the English and French judicial systems. In England (and America), the task of the court in criminal cases, which it devolves upon a jury, is to arrive at a verdict of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on the evidence presented by prosecuting and defending counsel in turns. Trials are conflicts and verdicts are decisions; the two sides ‘win’ or ‘lose’. In France, and other countries which observe Roman Law, the task of the court in a criminal case is to arrive at the truth, as far as it can be perceived by human eyes, and the business of establishing the outlines of the truth falls not on a jury, which is strictly asked to enter a judgement, but upon a juge d’instruction. This officer of the court, unknown to English law, is accorded very wide powers of interrogation–of the suspect, his family, his associates–and of investigation–of the circumstances and scene of the crime–at which the suspect is often required to participate in a reconstruction. Only when the juge is satisfied that a crime has indeed occurred and that the suspect is responsible will he allow the case to go forward for prosecution. The character of these two different legal approaches is usually defined as ‘accusatorial’ (English) and ‘inquisitorial’ (French) respectively.”
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“Malicious men may die, but malice never.”
― Molière, quote from Tartuffe


“In Fleury’s day, however, the grass was cut and the graves well cared for. Besides, as you might expect, he was fond of graveyards; he enjoyed brooding in them and letting his heart respond to the abbreviated biographies he found engraved in their stones . . . so eloquent, so succinct! All the same, once he had spent an hour or two pondering by his mother’s grave he decided to call it a day because, after all, one does not want to overdo the lurking in graveyards. This decision was not a very sudden one. From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had once had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian. The truth was that the tide of sensitivity to beauty, of gentleness and melancholy, had gradually ebbed leaving Fleury floundering on a sandbank. Young ladies these days were more interested in the qualities of Tennyson’s “great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman” than they were in pallid poets, as Fleury was dimly beginning to perceive. Louise Dunstaple’s preference for romping with jolly officers which had dismayed him on the day of the picnic had by no means been the first rebuff of this kind. Even Miriam sometimes asked him aloud why he was looking “hangdog” when once she would have remained silent, thinking “soulful”. All”
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