#Taxation Quotes

“What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? "He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.”

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

“I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”

“The purse of the people is the real seat of sensibility. Let it be drawn upon largely, and they will then listen to truths which could not excite them through any other organ.”

“There is no income tax in Russia. But there's no income.”

“We will never get anywhere with our finances till we pass a law saying...every time we appropriate something, we...pass another bill...stating where the money is coming from.”

“Baseball is a skilled game. It's America's game - it, and high taxes.”

“The budget is like a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, then reaches in and tries to pull real ones out.”

“Hurray! Congress is to adjourn! Only four more days of Congressional burglary on the Treasury!”

“When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise them. That's statesmanship of the highest order.”

“If your Income Taxes go to help out the less fortunate, there could be no legitimate kick against it in the world. This is becoming the richest, and the poorest Country in the world. Why? Why, on account of an unequal distribution of the money.”

“The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.”

“The "Ways & Means Committee" is a committee that's supposed to find the Ways to divide up the Means.”

“Say did you read in the papers about a bunch of Women up in British Columbia as a protest against high taxes, sit out in the open naked, and they wouldent put their clothes on? The authorities finally turned a Sprayer that you use on trees, on 'em. That may lead into quite a thing. Woman comes into the tax office nude, saying I won't pay. Well they can't search her and get anything. It sounds great. How far is it to British Columbia?”

“Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.”

“Alexander Hamilton originated the put and take system in our national treasury: the taxpayers put it in, and the politicians take it out”

“If a thousand shares of stocks or bonds make nothing, you pay nothing. But on a thousand acres of land you pay enough to support half the community who own no land and pay no taxes.”

“I don't see why a man shouldn't pay an inheritance tax. If a Country is good enough to pay taxes to while you are living, it's good enough to pay in after you die. By the time you die you should be so used to paying taxes that it would just be almost second nature to you.”

“Syntax must be bad, having sin and tax in it.”

“Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.”

“Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.”

“We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?”

“Now they got such a high inheritance tax on 'em that you won't catch these old rich boys dying promiscuously like they did. This bill makes patriots out of everybody. You sure do die for your country if you die from now on.”

“It costs ten times more to govern us than it used to, and we are not governed one-tenth as good.”

“Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.”

“It is a good thing that we do not get as much government as we pay for.”

“Politicians are just a bunch of local bandits, sent by their local voters to raid the public treasury.”

“I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone - not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 - shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain.”

“Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother me ... Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us-say, because we are disabled or unemployed.”

“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.”

“The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.”

“I think that actually people in my situation should be paying more tax.”

“It must be observed that our revenues are raised almost wholly on imported goods.”

“In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice.”

“The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance”

“Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.”

“We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.”

“It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check.”

“It is amazing how many of the intelligentsia call it "greed" to want to keep what you have earned, but not greed to want to take away what somebody else has earned, and let politicians use it to buy votes.”

“Since the government creates no wealth, it can only transfer the wealth required to hire people. Even if the government creates a million jobs, that is not a net increase in jobs, when the money that pays for those jobs is taken from the private sector, which loses that much ability to create private jobs.”

“What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.”

“If men will permit themselves to think, as rational beings ought to think, nothing can appear more ridiculous and absurd, exclusive of all moral reflections, than to be at the expence of building navies, filling them with men, and then hauling them into the ocean, to try which can sink each other fastester. Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infintely more advantage than any victory with all its expence. But this, though it best answers the purpose of Nations, does not that of Court Governments, whose habited policy is pretence for taxation, places, and offices.”

“Excessive taxation . . . will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.”

“Revenue on the consumption of foreign articles is paid cheerfully by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts.”

“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical...A wise and frugal government...shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned...Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated...Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands?”

“You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth - and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.”

“That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression; and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights, and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator”

“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”

“The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them - and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right. If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn't have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?”

“What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?”