You don't have to be a brain surgeon to be a valuable person. You become valuable because of the knowledge that you have. And that doesn't mean you won't fail sometimes. The important thing is to keep trying.

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

To be educated a person doesn't have to know much or be informed but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.

It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out in the military in the intelligence community.

The Homeland Security department doesn't have tasking authority in the intelligence community. They can ask for stuff but they can't direct anything except inside their bureau.

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.

The beautiful thing about my intelligence is that it doesn't really come in one specific department. So even if something hasn't happened to me I have information on how to get you through whatever you may be going through.

My work requires acting at its most committed - it demands actors of enormous resilience but also intelligence and wit. It doesn't work for narcissistic or selfish actors.

Well first of all we did lots of studies where we show practical intelligence doesn't correlate with G. We have probably two dozen studies that practical intelligence better predicts job success than IQ.

In Europe they call geeks 'smart people ' and frankly I think we live in a culture that doesn't value intelligence enough so I am very proud in saying that I am a geek.