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When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.

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What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

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The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself

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Justice is incedental to law and order.

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Reading musses up my mind.

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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

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If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave.

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Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.

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What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

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