"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
--Benjamin Franklin
"Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets."
--Ronald Reagan
"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."
--Voltaire
"Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer."
--Ludwig von Mises
"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
"Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."
--Calvin Coolidge
"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."
--Vladimir Lenin
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation."
--John Marshall
"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."
--Ronald Reagan
"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder."
--Benjamin Disraeli
"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."
--Calvin Coolidge
"Virtually everything is under federal control nowadays except the federal budget."
--Herman E. Talmadge
"The current tax code is a daily mugging."
--Ronald Reagan
"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that
the taxidermist leaves the skin."
--Mark Twain
"Income taxes have made more liars out of the American people than golf."
--Will Rogers
"The whole idea of government is this: if enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it."
--P.J. O'Rourke
"Lord, the money we do spend on government, and it's not a bit better then the government that we got for one-third the money twenty years ago,"
--Will Rogers
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
--George Bernard Shaw
"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
"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
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."
--Alexander Tyler (about the fall of the Athenian Republic)
"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
--Ronald Reagan
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
--H.L. Mencken
"The property of the people belongs to the people. To take it from them by taxation cannot be justified except by urgent public necessity. Unless this principle be recognized our country is no longer secure, our people no longer free."
--Calvin Coolidge
"When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he doesn't care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you"
--Milton Friedman
"Are you entitled to the fruits of your own labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?"
--Ronald Reagan
"As a taxpayer, you are required to be fully in compliance with the United States Tax Code, which is currently the size and weight of the Budweiser Clydesdales."
--Dave Barry
"Taxation with representation ain't so hot either."
--Gerald Barzan
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