Don Pendleton > Quotes

“Live Large!”
― Don Pendleton

“It was not bleeding quite so badly now, he decided—or maybe he was just running out of blood.”
― Don Pendleton, War Against the Mafia

“The bikini barely topped the swell of her lower abdomen, a thin stretch of elastic traversing the centerline of belled hips and plunging in back well below the pronounced cleft of swollen buttocks.”
― Don Pendleton, The Executioner Series Books 1–3: War Against the Mafia, Death Squad, and Battle Mask

“amount to a fart in a cyclone. His parents and their parson had tried to sell him the same message, binding him to a hardscrabble farm and a church built on strict “thou shalt nots.” Ridgway had kicked over the traces, gone out on his own and proved them wrong. In spades. Once he was rich as Croesus—no, scratch that; richer than Croesus or the Lord Himself—small minds kept after him in other ways. They told him that he should concentrate on oil and gas, stick with the things he knew, where he had proven his ability. Don’t branch out into other fields and least of all space exploration. What did any Texas oil man with a sixth-grade education know about the friggin’ moon and stars beyond it? Next to nothing, granted. But he had money to burn, enough to buy the brains that did know all about the universe and rockets, astrophysics, interplanetary travel—name your poison. And he knew some other things, as well. Ridgway knew that his country had been losing ground for decades—hell, for generations. Ever since the last world war, when Roosevelt and Truman let Joe Stalin gobble up half of the world without a fight. The great U.S. of A. had been declining ever since, with racial integration and affirmative action, gay rights and abortion, losing wars all over Asia and the Middle East. He’d done his best to save America, bankrolling groups that stood against the long slide into socialism’s Sodom and Gomorrah, but he’d finally admitted to himself that they were beaten. His United States, the one he loved, was circling the drain. And it was time to start from scratch. He’d be goddamned if some inept redneck would spoil it now. You want a job done right, a small voice in his head reminded him, do it yourself. San Antonio CONGRESS HAD CREATED the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2000, following the scandal that had enveloped Dr. Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee had been accused of passing secrets about America’s nuclear arsenal to the People’s Republic of China, pleading guilty on one of fifty-nine charges, then turned around”
― Don Pendleton, Patriot Strike

“Each man’s death was his own. He may not choose the time or place, he may not even realize that he was dying, but no two departures from this life were ever perfectly identical.”
― Don Pendleton, Frontier Fury

“Man,”
― Don Pendleton, Dead Reckoning

“hissed. The other nodded silently and they moved slowly toward the rear of the apartment. The larger man paused near the bedroom door, squinting in the near dark to inspect a long-barrel pistol he held in his hand. A silencing device was attached to the barrel of the pistol. The other man touched the pistol, his teeth revealing themselves in a smile. “No pissin’ around,” he whispered. “This guy’s good with a gun, they say.” The man with the pistol nodded and slowly turned the knob of the bedroom door, pushed the door wide, and stepped inside, the second man right behind. They were momentarily blinded, squinting into the bright rectangle of sunlight beyond the bed, but the gunman raised his arm and squeezed off three quick shots into the huddled lump on the bed, the big pistol “plutting” dully under the muzzle silencer. Then there was a sliding sound in the corner”
― Don Pendleton, War Against the Mafia

“Mack Bolan was not born to kill, as many of his comrades and superiors secretly believed. He was not a mechanically functioning killer-robot, as his sniper-team partners openly proclaimed. He was not even a cold-blooded and ruthless exterminator, as one leftist news correspondent tagged him. Mack was simply a man who could command himself.”
― Don Pendleton, The Executioner Series Books 1–3: War Against the Mafia, Death Squad, and Battle Mask

“Violence is the way of the world because competition is the way of life-perpetuation. Without violence there can be no competition, and without competition there can be no life. Something dies for every instant that something else lives.”
― Don Pendleton, War Against the Mafia

“Don't make the mistake of thinking that your soul is an island, Ash. It's as much a part of the continent as your body is. It is immune to being bought and sold because the original owner will not release the title.”
― Don Pendleton, Ashes to Ashes

“shaven,”
― Don Pendleton, Miami Massacre

“pants down, underneath the navy velvet blazer that completed his disguise, topped with a matching bellman’s hat like those worn by the Grand Hotel Kempinski’s servant staff, secured by a strap beneath his chin. He wasn’t happy with the uniform, but it made no difference, as long”
― Don Pendleton, Dead Reckoning

“Spring-tension hips were thrust high and forward and moving rhythmically for an even more disturbing effect.”
― Don Pendleton, The Executioner Series Books 1–3: War Against the Mafia, Death Squad, and Battle Mask