The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.
if you don’t write it down, then it never happened
Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.
Danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear.
If you don’t write it down, it never happened.Cathy (& Jack) Ryan
You couldn’t allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight.
Poor people have poor options. Chavez found the Army almost by accident, and had found it a true open of security and opportunity and fellowship and respect.
Courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits.
It wasn’t an epidemic yet because no one knew about it.
A rare academic (was) a man who knew what he didn’t know.
Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.
One thing about flying that he never got used to was that no matter how awful the weather was on the ground, if you flew high enough you could always find the sun.
A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.
How strange that he should feel trapped by plans he himself had set in motion.
There are only two ways we can be beaten: we die or we give up. And we’re not giving up.
Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.
It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.
People in the intelligence community are not made to believe in coincidences.
Diplomacy “was like a card game. The difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand.
The media “could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.
One presidential advisor to another: “If the world made sense, we’d all have to find honest work.
The point of life was to press on, to do the best you can, to make the world a better place.
I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Cheating was a concept both foreign and integral to the fighting of wars.
He was learning to curse his newly acquired status as resident genius.
The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read
They loved their country largely because they controlled it.
Ice hockey is the closest thing to religion permitted by the Soviet Union.
Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.
The assistant commander at any post is supposed to be a ruthless son of a bitch.
Comrade, you can deceive us. Anyone can―for a time. But not a very long time.
He had to do so many things and make each appear as though it were the only thing he had to do. He had to compartmentalize everything, when on one task to pretend that the others didn’t exist.
Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.
There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.
The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to put it on the line.
I was one of the first generations to watch television. TV exposes people to news, to information, to knowledge, to entertainment. How is it bad?
Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.
The human condition today is better than it’s ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.
There used to be this country called the Soviet Union it’s not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.
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.