Taxation Quotes

I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it. (Warren G. Harding)
Taxation without representation is tyranny. View quote
James Otis
The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality. View quote
Andrew Jackson
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. View quote
Robert Nozick
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. View quote
William Cobbett
Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces. View quote
Terry Pratchett
This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight. View quote
Robertson Davies
I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum. View quote
William Weld
The American people want a balanced budget. They want Congress to stop this barbaric practice of perpetual deficit spending. It really, if you think about it, is a form of taxation without representation. We fought a war over that issue and we won that war. View quote
Mike Lee (U.S. politician)
My first rule – the golden rule – ensures that over the economic cycle the Government will borrow only to invest, and that current spending will be met from taxation. (Gordon Brown)
Taxation being a burthen, must needs weigh lightest on each individual, when it bears upon all alike. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are. View quote
Ian Hacking
The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to procure the largest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Colbert
The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor. View quote
William Cobbett
No animal on the face of the earth could conceive of taxation. You and I work roughly six months a year to pay our local, state and federal taxes. If nothing else, this should convince you that animals are smarter than people. View quote
Rita Mae Brown
What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits-in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative-was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false. View quote
Tony Judt
The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community. View quote
James A. Garfield
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 free government. View quote
Grover Cleveland
Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation. View quote
Milton Friedman
There is a reason for the affected profession of "anarchist sympathies" among Tories and grandees, and of "libertarian principles" by Hobbesian yahoos of the right. Among the former, one sees the upholding of the view that a gentleman's business and property are his own, and none of the government's. Among the latter, a distaste for democracy, for taxation, and for the need to consult others about the planet. (Christopher Hitchens)
Men who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light. View quote
Sydney Smith
A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others. View quote
James Surowiecki
If we are true to Canada, if we do not desire to become part and parcel of these people, we cannot overlook this the greatest revolution of our times. Let us remember this, that when the three cries among our next neighbours are money, taxation, blood, it is time for us to provide for our own security... View quote
Thomas D'Arcy McGee
We have to change economic policy: create confidence, foster investment, cut the public deficit, restructure taxation and reform the labor laws. View quote
Mariano Rajoy