The Hunt for Red October (Jack Ryan, #3)

by Tom Clancy

How many times in his twenty years of service with the Red Banner Northern Fleet had he looked at the wide, flat U-shape? This would be the last. One way or another, he’d never go back.

“Objectively, that which aids us in carrying out our mission is good, that which hinders us is bad. Adversity is supposed to hone one’s spirit and skill, not dull them. Just being aboard a submarine is hardship enough, is it not?”

You give nothing to an enemy, Ivan, even in a drill.

In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying: As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.

“So, there is no going back,” Borodin observed. “We have all agreed upon our course of action. Now we are committed to it.”

The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.

First Rule of Security: The likelihood of a secret’s being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people who’re in on it.”

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

Submariners lived by a simple motto: There are two kinds of ships, submarines . . . and targets.

In theory the National Security Agency came under the titular control of the director of Central Intelligence. In fact it was a law unto itself.

It is a principle of diplomacy,” Pelt observed, “that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.”

“We have our differences, gentlemen, but the sea doesn’t care about that. The sea—well, she tries to kill us all regardless what flag we fly.”

Ryan took his time reading. While getting his doctorate in history at Georgetown University he had used a little free time to audit some psychology classes. He had come away with the gut suspicion that shrinks didn’t really know much of anything, that they got together and agreed on random ideas they could all use

One of the compensations for wearing a uniform and earning less money than an equally talented man can make in the real world is the off chance of being killed.

ships in

“Well, because if you don’t, what’s the point of life? That would mean Sartre and Camus and all those characters were right—all is chaos, life has no meaning. I refuse to believe that. If you want a better answer, I know a couple priests who’d be glad to talk to you.”

when you get down to it, five hundred feet, ten thousand feet, doesn’t make much difference. A hull fracture would kill you just as fast, just down here there’d be less residue for the next boat to try and recover.” “Keep thinking those happy thoughts, sir,”

In the intelligence business if you look hard enough for something, you find it, whether it’s really there or not.

It was people like these who had built the American Dream, and people like these who were needed to maintain it.

“It’s a free country, Captain,” Ryan said softly. “It will take you some time to understand what free really means.

You can kill fifty million people with that. ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’”