Having knowledge but lacking the power to express it clearly is no better than never having any ideas at all.

The Committee's review of a series of intelligence shortcomings to include intelligence prior to 9/11 and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq clearly reveal how vital a diverse intelligence workforce is to our national security.

Dr. Rice's record on Iraq gives me great concern. In her public statements she clearly overstated and exaggerated the intelligence concerning Iraq before the war in order to support the President's decision to initiate military action against Iraq.

When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early '90s I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn't want to because they had no pilots.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on based on preliminary successes.

Our democracy our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.

But if you read Jane Austen you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.