Quotes About Taxes

“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

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“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.”
― Winston Churchill

“Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“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

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Every culture has some ritual for joining two people together and making them stay that way, and ours is giving tax breaks.”
― Bauvard, Evergreens Are Prudish

“You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.”
― Ronald Reagan

“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

“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

“The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.”
― Judith Martin

“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.”
― Herman Wouk

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

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rick as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”
― Naomi Klein

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.”
― John Marshall

“As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“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

“Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Factor in the fact that factories should only hire people they make themselves, I believe, and you can see why I want to be self-employed and own a factory. This would mean I’d have thousands of clones of myself working for me. Think about it. I’ll increase my income thousands of times over, but I’ll only be paying tax for one person. 
”
― Jarod Kintz, The Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They're Over.

“A rather vicious cycle has been at work for years. Reduced taxes on the rich leave them with more money to influence politicians and politics. Their influence wins them further tax reductions, which gives them still more money to put to political use. When the loss of tax revenue from the rich worsens already strained government budgets, the rich press politicians to cut public services and government jobs and not even debate a return to the higher taxes the rich used to pay. So it goes – from Washington, to Wisconsin, to New York City.”
― Richard Wolff How the rich soaked the rest of us Guardian March 1 2011

“wouldn't you like to make sure all those millions you give to Uncle Sam went to schools and hospitals instead of nuclear warheads?'
As a matter of fact, he would. Playgrounds for big kids, preschool programs to little ones, and mandatory LASIK surgery for NFL refs.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer

“Being in love is like being lit on fire and having your loved one morph into a marshmallow as she runs to embrace you. But not being in love feels so much worse, possibly like being a tax collector. Actually, nothing compares to the lowliness of a tax collector.
”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

“They tax when you earn a dollar, they tax you when you save it, they tax you when you invest it. If you earn a dividend, they tax it again, and if you're stupid enough to die, they steal up to half.”
― Grover Norquist president of Americans for Tax Reform

“Yes here's to the founding fathers—slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes...”
― David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp

“Taxes and Texas—they have the same letters, but only one can go to hell.
”
― Jarod Kintz, Seriously delirious, but not at all serious

“Taxidermy and taxes go together like peanut butter and sodomy. Can somebody get me two slices of bread?
”
― Jarod Kintz, Seriously delirious, but not at all serious