I believe that reforming our intelligence community is one of the most important things that we can do in order to ensure that our country is in fact safer stronger and wiser.

We can no longer expect an Intelligence Community that is mostly male and mostly white to be able to monitor and infiltrate suspicious organizations or terrorist groups.

The intelligence community for the most part has no accountability at all to the Congress to us the American people and so they feel that they above the law.

If you look back today over the last 25 years it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general in particular in the field of human intelligence.

Over the course of two years we arrived at a point where we began to look at the value added by making information more easily accessible across the intelligence community both defense and national.

I can remember when I was National Security Adviser the intelligence community told us... they put out an intelligence report saying that Iran would never back off from attacks on shipping in the Gulf if we use force.

I am committed to ensure that our intelligence community law enforcement medical professionals and military have the information and funding needed to protect the American people from threats at home and abroad.

One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community and especially the counterterrorism community is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Our intelligence community needs better coordination of operations and exchange of information and that's why we need an overall director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center.

I'm the chairman of the intelligence committee. We don't only get formal briefings but we collect our information from the intelligence community in a variety of ways.

I don't want to talk about intelligence matters. I will say however that intelligence-community estimates should not become public in the way of this city and in the way of Congress.

The intelligence community gets hurt through sequestration.

In order to be successful against each of these threats we have to have a presence overseas work closely not only with our counterparts in the law enforcement community but also with the intelligence community.

It's part of a writer's profession as it's part of a spy's profession to prey on the community to which he's attached to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it an arid science. In reality however it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas play with language solve problems use my imagination and draw on my own childhood.

In my wildest imagination I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood in the poor rural community of Eufaula Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity and even the good in him is hardly accepted.

We need to have a pro-growth policy put in place that offers people hope and offers the opportunity for businesses to expand and for them to have confidence in what the world is going to look like for the next two or three or four years with respect to economic policy.

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 doubt I'll be singing forever because at some point people aren't going to want to hear my music and I hope that I'll still get the opportunity to write songs.

Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope by a limit imposed from without but falsely identified as lying within.