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90 quotes about taxes
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Published Tuesday, April 15, 2014 @ 5:37 AM EDT
Apr 15 2014

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

A dog who thinks he is a man's best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer.
-Fran Lebowitz

A fine is a tax for doing wrong; a tax is a fine for doing well.
-Unattributed

A person doesn't know how much he has to be thankful for until he has to pay taxes on it.
-Ann Landers

A society which turns so many of its best and brightest into tax lawyers may be doing something wrong.
-Hoffman F. Fuller

A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.
-George W. Bush

A tax loophole is something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform.
-Russell B. Long

An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.
-Daniel Webster

And above all, above all, honest work must be rewarded by a fair and just tax system. The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny.
-George McGovern

Anybody has a right to evade taxes if he can get away with it. No citizen has a moral obligation to assist in maintaining the government.
-J.P. Morgan

Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
-Oscar Wilde

Behind every man who achieves success,
Stands a mother, a wife and the IRS.
-Ethel Jacobson

Being audited by the IRS is like having an autopsy without the benefit of dying.
-Unattributed

Death and taxes are unsolved engineering problems.
-Romana Machado

Democracy is mob rule, but with income taxes.
-Unattributed

Doing your taxes is a great way to be reminded that you are unsuccessful, unmarried and childless without having to talk to your mother.
-Bryan Donaldson

Every advantage has its tax.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good software leads to more work. Bad software leads to more work. If there's any time left over from fiddling with software, people spend it on making the tax and legal systems more complicated.
-Bill Westfield

Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed.
-Bernard Berenson

Gradually, without noticing it, you turn into a Republican and judge everything on the basis of whether or not it will increase your taxes.
-Dave Barry

I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene.
-Dave Barry

I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.
-Roger Jones

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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

I owed the government $3,400 in taxes. So I sent them two hammers and a toilet seat.
-Sue Murphy

I prefer liquor store robbers with hungry kids to companies that locate offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.
-Warren Buffett

I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator and name it after the IRS.
-Robert Bakker (Mr. Bakker is a paleontologist)

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
-Edith Sitwell

I wouldn't mind paying taxes if I knew they were going to a friendly country.
-Dick Gregory

If I have sex, I know my quarterly estimated taxes must be due. And if it's oral sex, I know it's time to renew my driver's license.
-Ray Romano

If Patrick Henry thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.
-The Farmer's Almanac

If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
-Will Durant

If the Lord had meant us to pay income taxes, he'd have made us smart enough to prepare the return.
-Kirk Kirkpatrick

In case you didn't know, ethanol is made by mixing corn with your tax dollars.
-Paul A. Gigot

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
-Milton Friedman

Interesting thing about being rich is once you pay your taxes, you're still rich.
-Lewis Black

IRS: We've got what it takes to take what you've got.

-Unattributed (Bumper Sticker)

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

It's income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.
-Dave Barry

Like mothers, taxes are often misunderstood, but seldom forgotten.
-Lord Bramwell

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

Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is as satisfying as an income tax refund.
-F.J. Raymond

Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
-Gore Vidal

On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.
-Tom Lehrer

On the whole, I prefer not to be lectured on patriotism by those who keep offshore maildrops in order to avoid paying their taxes.
-Molly Ivins

Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but nothing in this world is certain but death and taxes.
-Benjamin Franklin

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by letting home 'owners' deduct mortgage interest payments.
-Florence King

Passive activity income does not include the following: Income from an activity that is not a passive activity.
-(Instructions to IRS Form 8582, Passive Activity Loss Limitations)

People want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.
-Will Rogers

Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.
-Paul Krugman

Politics is very much like taxes- everybody is against them, or everybody is for them as long as they don't apply to him.
-Fiorello LaGuardia

Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not.
-Dan Bennett

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 before.
-Art Buchwald

Taxes and golf are alike: you drive your heart out for the green, and then end up in the hole.
-Unattributed

The avoidance of taxes is the only pursuit that still carries any reward.
-John Maynard Keynes

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

The Eiffel Tower is the Empire State Building after taxes.
-Unattributed

The First Rule of Practicing Tax Law: If someone has to go to jail, make sure it's the client.
-Fred Drasner

The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.
-Russell Baker

The government is mainly an expensive organization to regulate evildoers and tax those who behave.
-E.W. Howe

The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes.
-Albert Einstein

The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.
-Barry M. Goldwater

The IRS may take some solace in the fact that Matthew was a tax collector before he became a saint.
-Donald C. Alexander

The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes.
-Will Cuppy

The one thing that hurts more than having to pay income tax is not having to pay income tax.
-Thomas R. Dewar

The only civilized country is one in which no man is afraid of the tax collector.
-Juan de Mariana

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
-Will Rogers

The only things in life that you can't avoid are death and taxes. And an occasional pedestrian.
-Perry Friedman

The trick is to stop thinking of it as 'your' money.
(On dealing with the IRS)
-Unattributed

The United States has a system of taxation by confession.
-Hugo Black

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

The wages of sin are death, but after taxes are taken out, it's just a tired feeling.
-Paula Poundstone

The way taxes are, you might as well marry for love.
-Joe E. Lewis

There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer space program: your tax dollars will go farther.
-Wernher von Braun

There is untold wealth in America, especially at tax time.
-(Cartoon caption in The Wall Street Journal)

There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little- and it's always somebody else.
-Cullen Hightower

This year I'm going to deduct last year's taxes as a bad investment.
-Unattributed

To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation.
-Jeff Daiell

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.
-Benjamin Disraeli

True, everyone lies, but there's a difference between 'No, those pants don't make your ass look fat, and 'No, there's nothing incriminating in those unreleased tax returns.'
-Kevin G. Barkes

War- after all, what is it that the people get? Why- widows, taxes, wooden legs and debt.
-Samuel B. Pettengill

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
-Mark Twain

What we should have fought for was representation without taxation.
-Sam Levenson

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.
-H.L. Mencken

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 everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise 'em. That's statesmanship of the highest order.
-Will Rogers

When it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.
-Mae West

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
-Plato

When you come into the world you have nothing... when you leave you have nothing... and in between there's the IRS.
-Bob Thaves

Why does a slight tax increase cost you $200 and a substantial tax cut save you 30 cents?
-Peg Bracken


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