I tell you, sir, that he is a thinker, and thinkers are rare, much more rare than people generally believe.

There is only one man out of ten thousand who does not act wholly according to precedent and experience.

Habit is so powerful that when we think we are thinking we are not thinking at all, we are merely recalling the experiences of ourselves or somebody else.

And of the rare individuals who leave the well-trod paths of thought to think new thoughts, only a minutely small percentage think right.

This minutely small fraction represents genius, the one man in a million or rather ten million, or, to be more accurate, the one man in a hundred million." Colonel Leonidas Talbot put the cigar back in his mouth and puffed with regularity and smoothness.