What's missing is leadership in the White House. And the story that Barack Obama does tell forever shifting blame to the last administration is getting old. The man assumed office almost four years ago - isn't it about time he assumed responsibility?

Leadership can not be measured in a poll or even in the result of an election. It can only be truly seen with the benefit of time. From the perspective of 20 years not 20 days.

These past years as we have been recovering and given our city a rebirth we have been encouraged by our faith knowledge and steadfast belief that we will pull through. There will be challenges and setbacks as there have already been but we will continue and we the citizens of New Orleans will prevail in bringing our city back.

For the longest time I was brought up listening to only two genres of music pop and rock. So in the past few years I've been trying to expand my interests because I think that you can only write to the extent of your knowledge and if your knowledge is limited you can't write past that.

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin and I've spoken with athletes who for years afterward have been tormented by the knowledge that had they done something ever so slightly different they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.

My knowledge of science came from being with Carl not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.

I enjoyed making this album a lot because of the knowledge we acquired over the last 3 years.

Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions.

May I say finally that I have no illusions of grandeur quite to the contrary I am very humble in my knowledge that through forty years of my life my life has been an open book of service to my fellow architects and for the public good.

I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.

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.