I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.

I believe that the quantum of our knowledge will increase considerably in the coming years and that scientists will continue to be amongst the brave voices speaking out.

I had a non-existent knowledge of Queen Victoria's early years. Like everyone else I thought of her as an old lady dressed in black. My mom had told me about her though that she had a very loving relationship with Albert that they had lots of kids and that he died young.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of flights in the last ten years I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a twenty-seven mile wind even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was safe.

Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.

The ordinary American - as far as I can tell - knows so much less than he did fifty years ago and has such poor work habits compared with fifty years ago that the average multiplicand of knowledge/capabilities is a much smaller number than it was in 1961.

For four years I listened to stories of intelligence failures and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system but that the system is so arcane.

And I understand that I testified in closed hearings over eight years because there are intelligence matters there are sensitive matters that should not be held in a public hearing.

A lot of the things that we've been able to do in the last several years were Democratic ideas including the structure for this new director of national intelligence.

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now after years of rebuilding our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

As a nation we have over the past seven years been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service our satellite and other technical collection our analytical depth and expertise.

Well it's a - I don't want to disappoint you but it's a time worn tradition of Australian Governments over many years not to get into any discussion about that aspect of intelligence matters.

If you look back today over the last 25 years it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general in particular in the field of human intelligence.

Over the course of two years we arrived at a point where we began to look at the value added by making information more easily accessible across the intelligence community both defense and national.

We have been working hard to think about what our combined needs are going to be in the way of intelligence capabilities not today but 15 to 20 years in the future.

When a decision is made to go to war based on intelligence it is a fateful decision. It has ramifications and impacts way beyond the current months and years.

Within thirty years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

I have had national security background 10 years on the Intelligence Committee the last two years as chair.

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents teachers and with each other carry emotional messages.

We will have to continue to improve our human intelligence system-something that was unfortunately lacking in the years which led up to September 11. This is going to be a continuing process of change.

Since we launched the original 'Pop Idol' in England I've remained close with Simon Fuller. Working as executive producer on 'American idol' for its first seven years not only was an inspirational journey into the heart of American pop culture it opened my eyes to the untapped potential of the incredibly dynamic young people in this world.

Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success on the stage.