Taxes Quotes

Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.

~ Margaret Mitchell

They're so broke that they've actually cut essential services. In many places, they've cut policemen, because, who the fuck needs them? Or firemen, son of a bitch, it's much more fun watching something burn down.

~ Lewis Black

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness... but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable.

~ Steve Maraboli

The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.

~ Paula Poundstone

There are only two things worse then an empty canvas: death and taxes.

~ Ragnar Tørnquist

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

~ Isabel Paterson

Every culture has some ritual for joining two people together and making them stay that way, and ours is giving tax breaks.

~ Bauvard

Fear and bigotry don’t need explaining. They simply are, like traffic jams and taxes.

~ Eileen Wilks

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

~ Frédéric Bastiat

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy--to be followed by a dictatorship.

~ Alexander Fraser Tytler

My feeling is this whole country is founded on the principle of 'if you are not hurting anyone, and you're not fucking with someone else's shit, and you are paying your taxes, you should be able to just do what you want to do.' It's the freedom and the independence.

~ Adam Carolla

By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence..

~ Joseph Sobran

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.

~ Sarah Caudwell

Indeed, it may most verily be saidThat only death and taxes certain are.

~ Ian Doescher

One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.

~ Ron Paul

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.Wait—Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.

~ Paul Krugman

Does the flat tax work?...The flat tax works in a country that is a former Communist state, with no investment capital, and low wage rates, which needs to build a capitalist economy from a base of approximately zero. The flat tax works if people are willing to pay a 20% sales tax on everything they buy to make up for lower revenue. The flat tax works if employers are willing to pay 34%, or more, in Social Security taxes for every employee they hire. The flat tax works in a country where almost everyone has the same amount of wealth so there's no need for the distributive effect of graduated rates. And if all these conditions are met, the flat-rate tax will probably work as long as the economy is on a path of steady growth.

~ T R Reid

The idea that Americans hate taxes has become a truism without the benefit of being true. Instead, Americans see paying taxes as a civic obligation and a political act. To be a taxpayer, Americans believe, is something to be proud of. It is evidence that one is a responsible, contributing, and upstanding member of society, a person worthy of respect in the community and representation in the government.

~ Vanessa Williamson

Because taxpaying is seen as an emblem of civic worthiness, denying the poor the status of taxpayers has the effect of denying their political standing. Classing a large percentage of the populace as a kind of second-class citizenry is genuinely toxic for democratic norms.

~ Vanessa Williamson

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

~ Thomas Piketty

Princes are fighters or administrators. Neither of those things do much to spread joy in the world. Whores, concubines, and catamites, on the other hand, are all about giving satisfaction. Now granted, sexual pleasure is a temporary sort of happiness, but it is better than a new tax or a sword in the gut.

~ Jill Knowles

When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is fair. Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being selfish and greedy. Later in life he will thank you.

~ Joseph Sobran

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

~ Herman Wouk

That which we want less of in society should rarely be privatized and that which we want more of often should be.

~ William Macgregor Robson

Tax is not a four-letter word; rather, it's the price we pay for the country we want.

~ Alex Himelfarb

The expenses of government, having for their object the interests of all, should be borne by every one, and the more a man enjoys the advantages of society, the more he ought to hold himself honoured in contributing to these expenses.

~ Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.

~ Jill Lepore

Using coercion to drive charity is like using kidnapping to create love.

~ Stefan Molyneux

You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.

~ Ronald Reagan

It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.

~ Adam Smith

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

~ Alain De Botton

Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.

~ Henry George

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

~ Isabel Paterson

Let's tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.

~ Walter Mondale

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

~ Thomas Jefferson

No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.

~ Rush Limbaugh

Green recorded these initial thoughts about government: Either the people will pay direct taxes, or they will pay none if they know it; and if they don't know when they pay taxes, it is quite time for the prudent, economical administration of government that they did. The Treasury should just supply the moderate wants of the administration of government; an overflowing treasury brings with it corruption and fraud. It has been the curse of nations, and, profiting by the experience of the past, it becomes the present to avoid the instruments of their overflow.

~ Michael Rubbinaccio