While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images devious and prejudicial language dubious linkages weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

I want to be taken seriously as the type of musician that plays stuff like an electric rake. I mean how seriously do you take someone like Spike Jones? They take him pretty seriously - a really good musician who made a great contribution in terms of humor which is part of what I try to do too.

What I hope is in five years' time I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked but it has worked.

As a relatively young woman - I'm 33 - I hope to one day have a family and already have commitments. If and when I'm elected as an MP I would face a choice: take my family with me to London each week or be apart for four maybe five nights a week.

For me Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.

I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years 'cuz he ain't gotta worry about getting re-elected.

In an election one needs both hope and audacity.

In the end that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33 000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.

Working in an office with an array of electronic devices is like trying to get something done at home with half a dozen small children around. The calls for attention are constant.

If anything a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home hardly. It's really only to be heard when everyone's out enjoying it.

The only way I'd be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue.

It's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town in a very modest home are just the things that I believe have won the election.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town in a very modest home are just the things that I believe have won the election.

If I had been elected president in 1948 history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.

Nixon's full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country's history.

Natural selection as it has operated in human history favors not only the clever but the murderous.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes on those which were best and greatest it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.

Nixon in 1968 unlike Obama 2008 was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet in 1972 he won what in some measures was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.