The Background for Good Conversation : Page 112

The greatest conversation is that which produces the greatest, the truest ideas, which help mankind see a bit less darkly through life's dark glass. It is the thinker who produces such ideas. A student who, being told that boarding school and army life are the same in principle, ponders this contention until he sees that there is one radical difference. In the army, he notes, if one breaks a rule one goes to the guardhouse, but in boarding school if one does so the worst punishment is the invitation to leave. If he then concludes that therefore they are in principle the exact opposites, the enforced and the voluntary, he is growing into a Johnsonian conversational stature. If he thinks things through like that on many subjects, he is bound to talk often and to be thought a significant conversationalist.