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.

Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants crowded together around the Hill blackening the ground that you begin to see the whole beast and now you observe it thinking planning calculating. It is an intelligence a kind of live computer with crawling bits for its wits.

Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the oppressed and delivering justice to the violent they are making America more secure.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in of course and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house that was done many thousands of years ago.

Five thousand people every day lose their home because of a medical bankruptcy. Most of them had insurance.

In Afghanistan there is a plan to build democracy hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.