Taxation Quotes

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.

Bernard Berenson

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

Oscar Wilde

Milk the cow, but do not pull off the udder.

Proverb

No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.

John Ruskin

We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.

Leona Helmsley

Only little people pay taxes.

Leona Helmsley

Anyone may so arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible. He is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.

Judge Learned Hand

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

Ludwig von Mises

The repose of nations cannot be secure without arms. Armies cannot be maintained without pay, nor can the pay be produced without taxes.

Tacitus

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.

Denis Healey

Once Confucius was walking on the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what here sorrow was, and she replied, We are a family of hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now my only son! Why don't you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to live up here? asked Confucius. And the woman replied, But sir, there are no tax collectors here! Confucius added to his disciples, You see, a bad government is more to be feared than tigers.

Lin Yutang

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

H. L. Mencken

When all is lost, ask the I.R.S. -- they'll find something.

Doug Horton

Read my lips: no new taxes.

George Bush

If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; And the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers; And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering ... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Thomas Jefferson

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.

William Cobbett

Uncle claims that if he files his income tax wrong he'll go to jail, and if he files it right he'll go to the poor house.

Nonnee Coan

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.

J. B. Colbert

Patrick Henry railed against taxation without representation. He should see it with representation.

Saul Landau