Tax Quotes
	When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money'. When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket'. When the State demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax'. -- Jeff Daiell
	A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. --G. Gordon Liddy
	Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. --Douglas Casey (1992)
	Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. --P.J. O'Rourke
	Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. --Frederic Bastiat
	Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. -- Ronald Reagan (1986)
	I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. --Will Rogers
	If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist. --Joseph Sobran (1995)
	Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. --Pericles (430 B.C.)
	Talk is cheap-except when Congress does it. The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. --Ronald Reagan
	The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. --Winston Churchill
	The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. --Herbert Spencer (1891)
	There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. --P.J. O'Rourke (1993)
	A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude. -- President Calvin Coolidge
	What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. --Edward Langley
	When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. --P.J. O'Rourke
	Power over a man's substance is power over his will. --Alexander Hamilton
	It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. …They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs."--Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776]
	War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsopposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes."--Thomas Paine, Prospects on the Rubicon [1787]
	Politicians can't give us anything without depriving us of something else. Government is not a god. Every dime they spend must first be taken from someone else. --Gary Asmus
	Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. --Woodrow Wilson
	The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. --Alexis de Tocqueville
	If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when its free. --P.J. O'Rourke
	Freedom from want supposedly results from government taking away what a person owns so that it can give him back what it thinks he deserves. --James Bovard
	If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves. --Auberon Herbert, in State Education: A Help or Hindrance, 1880
	The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of governmental power. --General Douglas MacArthur
	The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. --U.S. Senator William Borah
	The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the greatest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing. --M. Colbert, Finance Minister to King Louis XIV
	When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare. --Howard Kershner
	To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. . .I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. --President Thomas Jefferson
	"Taxpayer:" Someone who works for the government but doesn't have to take a civil service examination. --President Ronald Reagan
	In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other. --Voltaire, French philosopher
	An income tax form is like a laundry list--either way you lose your shirt. --Fred Allen, humorist
	What's the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin. --Mark Twain, humorist
	The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties. --President Woodrow Wilson
	The difference in spending habits between government and a drunken sailor is, at least a drunken sailor spends his own money. --President Ronald Reagan
	The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. --Albert Einstein, scientist
	The key to government is you need two factors to get your funding--you need guilt and you need greed. If they don't work, throw in fear. --Jerry Brown, former governor, now Oakland's mayor
	When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government. --President Grover Cleveland
	In the old days, people in general either laughed at me and called me a nut or ignored me altogether. All of that changed (after we won). In the end, I have to ask myself the same question a lot of people have asked me: Why did I do it? I'm not sure I know the answer. I thought that because of my political experience and my legal knowledge and my knowledge of taxes and the fact that I had some money, I might be able to help those people who were losing their homes because they couldn't make the tax payments. If there's a chance you can accomplish something like that, I think you have an obligation to try. (Our victory) proved the people were not numb anymore. The people decided to force elected officials to stop playing politics and do what was right for the people of the United States. The people told the politicians and bureaucrats to start being statesmen and stop being opportunists. They told the politicians to stop thinking of themselves first and start thinking of us. --Howard Jarvis, tax cutter
	Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, author.
	Taxes, more than anything else, keep consumers from ever getting their money's worth. --J. K. Kahn
	Government expands to absorb revenue and then some. --Tom Wicker, author.
	Government, in its last analysis, is organized force. --President Woodrow Wilson
	The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. --Edmund Burke, English statesman
	The power to tax necessarily involves the power to destroy. --John Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice
	There is nothing wrong with the United States that a dose of smaller and less intrusive government will not cure. --Milton Friedman, Nobel prize-winning economist
	There is no surer method of economizing and saving money than in the reduction of the number of officials. --Winston Churchill, British prime minister
	It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part. --Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father
	Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery. --President Calvin Coolidge
	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 Heinlein, author
	Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. --Thomas Paine, Founding Father
	The more that is given, the less the people will work for themselves and the less the work, the more their poverty increases. --Leo Tolstoy, author
	The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer people become. --Lao-tsu, Chinese philosopher
	Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it. --Milton Friedman, Nobel prize-winning economist
	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, British prime minister
	'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer. --Joseph Sobran, columnist.
	If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves. --Thomas Sowell, author/columnist
	The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. --Frederic Bastiat, French political scientist.
	Government spends what government receives, plus as much as it can get away with. --Milton Friedman, Nobel-prize winning economist
	April is the month when the green returns to the lawn, the trees, and the IRS. --Evan Esar
	Nothing is certain but death and taxes. Of the two, taxes happen annually. --Joel Fox
	The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. 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. --Will Rogers
	Taxes are like golf. You drive your heart out for the green, then end up in the hole. --Anonymous
	Form 1040 was chosen by the IRS because for every $50 you earn, you get 10 and they get 40. --Jay Leno
	Noah must have taken into the Ark two taxes, one male and one female. And did they multiply! Next to guinea pigs, taxes must have been the most prolific animals. --Will Rogers
	There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. --Judge Learned Hand
	The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward. --Economist John Maynard Keynes
	Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society. --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1904, before the federal income tax was enacted. At that time, the average total tax burden was 7% of income, not today's 40%.
	An economy hampered by excessive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. --President John F. Kennedy
	The best things in life are free, but sooner or later the government will find a way to tax them. --Anonymous
	I believe that the 16th amendment has created a system that is economically destructive, impossibly complex, overly intrusive, unprincipled, dishonest, unfair, and inefficient--Rep. Sam Johnson R-Texas
	Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual. --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
	Indoors or out, no one relaxes in March, that month of wind and taxes. The wind will presently disappear, the taxes last us all the year. --Ogden Nash
	Isn't it appropriate that the month of the tax begins with April Fool's Day and ends with cries of 'May Day!'--Robert Knauerhase
	This is the season of the year when we discover that we owe most of our success to Uncle Sam. --The Wall Street Journal
	I believe we should all pay our tax bill with a smile. I tried but they wanted cash. --Anonymous
	The only time the average child is as good as gold is April 15th. --Anonymous
	Like mothers, taxes are often misunderstood, but seldom forgotten. --Lord Bramwell
	There's nothing wrong with the younger generation that becoming taxpayers won't cure. --Dan Bennett
	Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation. --Fletcher Knebel
	American workers spend more of their day working to pay taxes than they do to feed, clothe, and house their families. --The Tax Foundation
	There is only one thing worse than the flu season; the tax season. You can recover from the flu. --Anonymous
	Excessive taxation will carry reason and reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election. --Thomas Jefferson
	The politician's promises of yesterday are the taxes of today. --W.L. Mackenzie King
	Count the day won, when, turning on its axis, this Earth imposes no additional taxes. --Franklin Pierce Adams
	There is no art which one government sooner learns from another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. --Adam Smith
	There are two distinct classes of men . . . those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes. --Thomas Paine
	In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice. --Voltaire
	Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today. --Herman Wouk
	Dear Mr. President, Internal Revenue regulations will turn us into a nation of bookkeepers. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business. --Saul Bellow's "Herzog" (1964)
	The trick is to stop thinking of it as 'your' money. --Advice given by revenue auditor
	Of all debts, men are least willing to pay taxes. What a satire is this on government!--Ralph Waldo Emerson "Politics," 1844
	A dog who thinks he is a man's best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer. --Fran Lebowitz Social Studies, 1981
	I am proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is - I could be just as proud for half the money. --Arthur Godfrey
	You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form. The short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls 'simplified,' which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears tax preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last names . . . The IRS wants you to use the short form because it gets to keep most of your money. So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long form. --Dave Barry "Sweating Out Taxes"
	There's only one kind of tax that would please everybody --one that nobody but the other guy has to pay. --Earl Wilson
	I have something my tax doctor calls 'narcotaxis.' Within 20 seconds of hearing someone launch into an explanation of tax laws, my eyes become glassy, my body loses all feeling, and I go into a shallow coma. --Russell Baker commenting in column "Sunday Observer," the New York Times (4-19-87)
	Loophole: To liberals, any provision of the tax code that fails to claim money earned, inherited, saved, or otherwise pocketed by known taxpayers. --The Conservative's Dictionary
	The chief deduction most people make from their income tax is that government costs too darned much. --Walt Streightiff
	The nation ought to have a tax system which looks like someone designed it on purpose. --William E. Simon
	When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise 'em. That's statesmanship of the highest order. --Will Rogers
	In the end, when you're dealing with tax laws, the pigs get fatter and the hogs get slaughtered. --Gene Gavin
	If the Lord had meant us to pay income taxes, he'd have made us smart enough to prepare the return. --Kirk Kirkpatrick
	Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math. --Bumper Sticker
	People who complain about taxes can be divided into two classes: men and women. --Anonymous
	The invention of the teenage 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, nobody wants to live any other way. --Judith Martin
	The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government. --Barry M. Goldwater
	Thank God they're not doing brain surgery. --Fred Allen commenting about the IRS
	Luxury: Any bare necessity, with taxes added. --David Crown's reference to luxury tax
	My 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 tax bar is the repository of the greatest ingenuity in America, and given the chance, those people will do you in. --Martin D. Ginsburg
	I have no intention of raising taxes. --President Bill Clinton
	It's a game. We [tax lawyers] teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich--and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them. --John Grisham
	We have long had death and taxes as the two standards of inevitability. But there are those who believe that death is the preferable of the two. 'At least,' as one man said, 'there's one advantage about death; it doesn't get worse every time Congress meets'. --Erwin N. Griswold
	Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed. --Robert Heinlein
	It is fairer to tax people on what they extract from the economy, as roughly measured by their consumption, than to tax them on what they produce for the economy, as roughly measured by their income. --Thomas Hobbes
	A society which turns so many of its best and brightest into tax lawyers may be doing something wrong. --Hoffman F. Fuller
	I have trouble reconciling my net income with my gross habits. --Errol Flynn
	Taxes are the killing fields of Democrats. --Grover Norquist
	Your profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level by taxation. Your income will be subject to higher taxes. Indeed in these days, when every available dollar should go to the war effort, I do not think that any American citizen should have a net income in excess of $25,000 per year after payment of taxes. --President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Radio Broadcast, April 28, 1942
	Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes. --Dave Barry "Sweating Out Taxes"
	All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on everything, are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people. --Brooks Adams
	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
	It is seldom given to mortal man to feel superior to a tax lawyer. --Anthony C. Amsterdam
	When it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin. --Mae West
	Read my lips. No new taxes. --President George Bush
	It is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to skin them. --Tiberius Caesar
	The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name. --Benjamin N. Cardozo
	The federal income tax system is a disgrace to the human race. --Jimmy Carter
	No statesman ever will find it worth his pains to tax our labours and excise our brains. --Charles Churchill
	Rulers do not reduce taxes to be kind. Expediency and greed create high taxation, and normally it takes an impending catastrophe to bring it down. --Charles Adams
	The current income tax code is the chief source of political corruption in the nation's capitol. --Rep. Richard K. Armey, R-Texas
	The IRS has had substantial success in Chicago. Al Capone was convicted on tax evasion here, and that was probably the last time a majority of Americans applauded the IRS on anything. --Sheldon L. Banoff
	Are we EVER going to have a federal tax system that regular people can understand?--Dave Barry
	Tax reform is not for the timid. --Rep. Richard K. Armey, R-Texas
	Your federal government needs your money so that it can perform vital services for you that you would not think up yourself in a million years. --Dave Barry
	Unless we wish to hamper the people in their right to earn a living, we must have tax reform. --President Calvin Coolidge
	The only people helped by the death tax are lawyers, accountants, and IRS agents. --Rep. Bob Schaffer, R-Colo.
	The IRS has 480 different tax forms, plus 280 more to explain how to fill out the first 480. The original Tax Code had 11,400 words; today it has 7 million. --Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas
	Contrary to what some people claim, the tax laws have a lot of respect for logic. They use it so sparingly. --Jeffrey L. Yablon
	The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. --President Calvin Coolidge
	. . . If the exercise of power of internal taxation by the Union should be discovered on experiment to be really inconvenient, the federal government may then forbear the use of it . . . --Alexander Hamilton
	I want to be sure that he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he is told, that every income tax return I want to see, I see. --President Richard M. Nixon commenting on the kind of IRS Commissioner he wanted
	No taxation without respiration. --Rep. Bob Schaffer, R-Colo., on repeal of the death tax.
	Whenever taxes become burdensome, a remedy can be applied by the people; but if they do not act for themselves, no one can be very successful in acting for them. --President Calvin Coolidge
	[Congress should] pull the current income tax code out by its roots and throw it away. --Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas, at a Ways and Means Committee hearing
	Internal Revenue Service: The world's most successful mail order business. --Bob Goddard
	The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return. --Gore Vidal
	Why does a slight tax increase cost you $200 and a substantial tax cut saves you 30 cents?--Peg Bracken
	Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed. --Art Buchwald
	Tax reform means, 'Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.'--Russell Long
	If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation. --Farmer's Almanac
	The United States is the only country where it takes more brains to figure your tax than to earn the money to pay it. --Edward J. Gurney
	No man's property is safe while Congress is in session. --Mark Twain
	I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going. --George Bernard Shaw
	The trouble with an income-tax reduction is that it will stimulate business just enough to put everybody in a higher tax bracket. --Harold Coffin
	[American tax laws] are constantly changing as our elected representatives seek new ways to ensure that whatever tax advice we receive is incorrect. --Dave Barry
	Whether or not it takes a village to raise a child, it seems to take a village these days to plan one rich person's taxes. --Lee A. Sheppard
	Anyone may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. --Judge Learned Hand
	We must get rid of the IRS. It's a bureaucracy fraught with totalitarianism. --Rep. Sonny Bono, R-California
	Anyone who's received a notice in the mail from the IRS knows how it can cause the blood pressure to rise. --Rep. James A. Traficant, D-Ohio
	Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation. --Milton Friedman
	You know it's a bad day when your income tax refund check bounces. --Anonymous
	The income tax people are very nice. They're letting me keep my own mother. --Henny Youngman
	Save our Trees. Stop Printing Tax Forms!--Bumper Sticker
	All taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. --Jim Fiebig
	I owe the government $3400 in taxes. So I sent them two hammers and a toilet seat. --Sue Murphy
	The reward of energy, enterprise and thrift is taxes. --William Feather
	There is nothing more permanent than a temporary tax. --Anonymous
	Micro-Ap, a manufacturing company based in Londonderry, NH, paid $18,267.40 in taxes last year. In September, the firm received a bill from the Internal Revenue Service for one cent, plus a penalty of $194.72. --Anonymous
	Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others. --Oscar Wilde
	When two-thirds of married couples are required to pay higher income taxes solely because they are married, the American public rightly loses respect for the law. --Michael J. Graetz
	Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund. --F. J. Raymond
	Most voters would rather have their purse or wallet stolen than be audited by the IRS. --Frank Luntz
	Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax. --Anonymous
	Old MacDonald had an agricultural real estate tax abatement. --Anonymous
	Tariff: A scale of taxes on imports designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
	The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hotlines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. --Dave Barry "Sweating Out Taxes"
	A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right. --Anonymous
	Born Free . . . Taxed to Death. --Anonymous
	Congress should take the IRS, hand-cuff them to a chain-link fence and flog them with their own damn tax code. --Rep. James A. Traficant, D-Ohio
	The IRS sent back my tax return saying I owed $800. I said 'if you'll notice, I sent a paper clip with my return. Given what you've been paying for things lately, that should more than make up the difference.'--Anonymous
	Have you ever wondered if taxation without representation was cheaper. --Anonymous
	State-run lotteries: Think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent. --Evan Leibovitch
	To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation. --Jeff Daiell
	Houseless: Having paid all taxes on household goods. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
	The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. --James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
	We've got so much taxation. I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed except the answer to prayer. --Mark Twain
	When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money.' When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket.' When the state demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax.'--Jeff Daiell
	When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty. --George Mason
	Logic and taxation are not always the best of friends. --James C. McReynolds
	There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. --Albert Jay Nock
	Where there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income. --Plato
	There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer space program: your tax dollars will go farther. --Wernher Von Braun
	He who has the base necessities of life should pay nothing; taxation on him who has a surplus may, if need be, extend to everything beyond necessities. --Jean Jacques Rousseau
	No one imagines that a law professing to tax will be permitted to destroy. --John Marshall
	The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring over his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. --Sydney Smith
	If Congress were to pass a flat tax, you'd simply pay a fixed percentage of your income, and you wouldn't fill out any complicated forms, and there would be no loopholes for politically connected groups, and normal people would actually understand the tax laws, and giant talking broccoli stalks would come around and mow your lawn for free, because Congress is NOT going to pass a flat tax, you pathetic fool. --Dave Barry
	It's getting so that children have to be educated to realize that 'Damn' and 'Taxes' are two separate words. --Anonymous
	The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night. --Otto Von Bismarck
	Nuclear physics is much easier than tax law. It's rational and always works the same way. --Jerold Rochwald
	Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. --Herbert Hoover
	All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says. --Walter B. Wriston
	There's only one way to kill capitalism--by taxes, taxes, and more taxes. --Karl Marx
	Keep your tax-cutting, greedy hands off our Medicare. --Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
	The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior numbers is a shilling saved to their own pockets. --James Madison
	Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money. --Dave Barry "Sweating Out Taxes"
	Death: to stop paying taxes suddenly. --Anonymous
	A penny saved is bound to be taxed. --Anonymous
	IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you've got. --Bumper Sticker
	When Congress talks about simplification, taxpayers may well be reminded of Emerson's comments regarding an acquaintance, 'the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons'. --Michael J. Graetz
	The Tax Code is a monstrosity and there's only one thing to do with it. Scrap it, kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it and hope it never rises again to terrorize the American people. --Steve Forbes
	In case you didn't know, ethanol is made by mixing corn with your tax dollars. --Paul A. Gigot
	Virtually every major accounting firm is an aggressive adversary of tax simplification. --Stephan Moore, CATO
	The tax collector must love poor people--he's creating so many of them. --Bill Vaughan
	The thing generally raised on city land is taxes. --Charles Dudley Warner
	Our federal income tax defines the tax Y to be paid in terms of the income X; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archaeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo. --Hermann Weyl
	Never before have so many been taken for so much by so few and left with so little. --Van Panopoulos
	For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
	Only little people pay taxes. --Leona Helmsley
	This [preparing my tax return] is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher. --Albert Einstein
	[A tax loophole is] something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform. --Senator Russell B. Long
	The Government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul. --George Bernard Shaw
	You enjoy the most delicious of all privileges, spending other people's money.--John Randolph, 18th century Virginia senator, speaking to his colleagues
	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. -- Thomas Paine
	A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. --Alexander Tytler, circa 1787, on the fall of the Athenian Republic.
	The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back into bondage. --Alexander Tytler, circa 1787, on the fall of the Athenian Republic.
	Taxes prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, - that is, an extension of the revenue . . . If duties are too high they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. -- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 21
	Taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the budget. -- John Maynard Keynes
	The strongest incentive for cultural activity is to lower as much as possible the amounts of individual imposts levied on upon persons capable of undertaking cultural enterprises. -- Ibn Khaldun
	If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute. --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
	The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance. -- Cicero , 55 BC
	I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. -- Thomas Jefferson