Doubt is the middle position between knowledge and ignorance. It encompasses cynicism but also genuine questioning.

There's no question that as science knowledge and technology advance that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

In my professional work with the Agency by the late '70s I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals robotics artificial intelligence nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

Pat Roberts and I both feel very strongly that when we get to Iran that we can't make the same mistakes. We have to ask the questions the hard questions before not afterwards and get the right intelligence.

I think we need to ask serious questions about how we engage militarily when we engage militarily and on what basis we engage militarily. What kind of intelligence do we have to justify a military engagement?

Here's the teaching point if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

There's a lot of neuroscience now raising the question 'Is all the intelligence in the human body in the brain?' and they're finding out that no it's not like that. The body has intelligence itself and we're much more of an organic creature in that way.