Calvin Coolidge
Politician
"Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."
Taxation quotes
Taxation
172 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Justice, Jurist, Author
"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Politician
"Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle."
Edmund Barton
Politician
"If it is the duty of the State to educate, it is the duty of the State also to bear the burden of education, namely, the taxation out of which education is provided."
Lucy Stone
Abolitionist, Women's Rights Advocate
"I return my tax bill without paying it. My reason for doing so is that women suffer taxation yet have not representation."
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Taxation quotes (page 1 of 9)
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"Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons"
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"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo."
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"You don't pay taxes - they take taxes."
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"But we need to quit taxing people upon death. No taxation without respiration."
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"Our domestic problems are for the most part economic. We have our enormous debt to pay, and we are paying it. We have the high cost of government to diminish, and we are diminishing it. We have a heavy burden of taxation to reduce, and we are reducing it. But while remarkable progress has been made in these directions, the work is yet far from accomplished."
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"If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing."
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"Everything a politician promises at election time has to be paid for either by higher taxation or by borrowing."
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"To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, 'to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.' For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union."
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"Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies."
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"Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation."
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"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."
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"Even if you assume that the whole economy would work better had we never had double taxation, having the envy and resentment of the richest paying low or no taxes screams of injustice. You have to have a fair system."
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"Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own."
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"Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs."
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"Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces."
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"In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice."
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"The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression."
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"Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society."
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"Taxes are indeed very heavy - We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness. Three times as much by our Pride. And four times as much by our Folly."
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"Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without."
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