Debt of Honor (Jack Ryan, #7; Jack Ryan Universe, #8)

by Tom Clancy

Daughters, he told himself, were God’s revenge on you for being a man: you lived in mortal fear that they might accidentally encounter somebody like—yourself at that age.

Having protested the construction and operation of the boats for thirty years, they were now protesting their dismantlement,

What backed the money was not gold or something of intrinsic value, but rather the collective belief that money had value because it had to have such value. Thus it was that the monetary system of the United States and every other country in the world was entirely an exercise in psychology, a thing of the mind, and as a result, so was every other aspect of the American economy. If money was simply a matter of communal faith, then so was everything else.

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skillful manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.

“Our grandchildren either won’t care or they’ll ask what the big deal was,”

and you just know that CNN will make a big deal about it, one of their hour-long special-report gigs, with lots of good pictures and inaccurate commentary.”

Even successful charity could be a burden on the national soul.

“People really are the same all over the world, aren’t they?” “Different masks, but the same flesh underneath,”

It would take weeks to determine what had really gone wrong, but by that time perception and the reactions to it would have long since overtaken reality.

The old Washington story, Newton thought with a smirk. If two people know it, it’s not a secret.

There had to be speeches. Worse, there had to be a lot of speeches.

Psychiatrists called his form of action “passive-aggressive,” meaning that he didn’t resist but didn’t cooperate either. It was a source of constant surprise to Ryan that important grown-ups so often acted like five-year-olds.

was tempted to grumble that his country’s intelligence services never had what he wanted at the moment, but the real reason for that was simple: the intelligence he did have usually enabled America to prepare, to obviate problems before they became problems. It was the things that got overlooked that developed into crises, and they were overlooked because other things were more important—until the little ones blew up.

“No way that would stand up to examination.” “It doesn’t have to, damn it. We’re talking politics, remember, not facts, and we have elections coming up.

The entire system was called a true democracy, but if it was, then a herd of nervous cattle was a democracy, too.

The pace on the floor was killing, and you had to be young and stupid, in addition to being young and brilliant, to survive out there.

History’s most often repeated lesson was that logic was not a constant in the behavior of nations. The study of history was not always bilateral. And the lessons learned from history depended on the quality of the student.

Amazing. The man had principles after all. So much the better that they were not accompanied by insight.

He’d arrived expecting to find a pleasant, interesting place to do business. He’d come to dislike many aspects of Japanese culture, mainly the assumed local superiority to everything else in the world, particularly offensive to a Russian who felt exactly the same way.

It was a magic word, trust. It meant that you had an obligation to the people who gave it to you. It meant that they believed what you said about yourself, and that you had to prove that it was real, not merely to them, but to yourself as well.

The strain of continuous decision-making was starting to tell. And all he could do about that was to switch to decaf.

A typical executive secretary, she handled the irregularity better than her boss could ever have done.

“That’s all well and good,” he said after a few seconds, meaning that it wasn’t well and good at all, and everybody knew it.

we have a debt of honor to the people on those islands who decided that they wanted to be Americans. If we don’t defend that principle, we don’t defend anything. And nobody will trust us, and nobody will respect us, not even ourselves. If we turn our back on them, then we are not the people we say we are, and everything we’ve ever done is a lie.”

There is something about inevitability that offends human nature. Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed. But man is also a creature prone to error, and sometimes that makes inevitable the things that he so often seeks to avoid.

The problem with a free press was that it gave out information to everyone, and over the past two decades it had become so good a source of information that his country’s own intelligence services used it for all manner of time-critical data. For its part, the public had grown more sophisticated in its demands for news, and the networks had responded by improving both its collection and analysis. Of course, the press had its weaknesses. For real insider information it depended too much on leaks and not enough on shoeleather, especially in Washington, and for analysis it often selected people motivated less by facts than by an agenda. But for things that one could see, the press often worked better than trained intelligence officers on the government payroll.

As often as he had observed or engaged in it, diplomatic exchange, Adler thought, combined the worst aspects of explaining things to a toddler and talking with a mother-in-law. It was dull. It was tedious. It was exasperating. And it was necessary.

He looked over at the Army people and winked. They looked rather pale. Well, that was one advantage of being black, wasn’t it? Claggett thought.