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Taxes Quotes

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Taxes Quotes

“All I'm doing is I'm filling out my tax returns - or my accountants are, and I'm paying whatever I'm supposed to pay, though I'm giving away a large amount of the money and that probably lowers my tax rate because I'm giving away so much money. But change the law, but don't blame me for the law. I'm not writing the law. I didn't write the law.”

“I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper - The Revolution - four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government... And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."”

“Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them, and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does this not involve the principle of a national establishment ... ?”

“Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority.”

“However accurate or inaccurate the agency's numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.”

“[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.”

“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.”

“It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and him in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the violation of laws. There is no she or her or hers in the tax laws, and this is equally true of all the criminal laws.”

“Modern marriage is first and foremost a romantic and private union, but the tax laws and inheritance laws and religious implications that still surround this institution indicate that marriage has evolved without casting away its earlier purposes or assumptions. It's like we just keep building on this thing, piling new advancements on the old model.”

“Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay your taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. ... Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, 'Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?'”

“The law before us, my lords, seems to be the effect of that practice of which it is intended likewise to be the cause, and to be dictated by the liquor of which it so effectually promotes the use; for surely it never before was conceived by any man entrusted with the administration of public affairs, to raise taxes by the destruction of the people.”

“What a pity it is that our Congress had not known this discovery, and that Alexander Hamilton’s projects of raising an army of fifty thousand Men, ten thousand of them to be Cavalry and his projects of sedition Laws and Alien Laws and of new taxes to support his army, all arose from a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off! and that the same vapours produced his Lyes and Slanders by which he totally destroyed his party forever and finally lost his Life in the field of Honor.”

“Which countries contain the most peaceful, the most moral, and the happiest people? Those people are found in the countries where the law least interferes with private affairs; where the government is least felt; where the individual has the greatest scope, and free opinion the greatest influence; where the administrative powers are fewest and simplest; where taxes are lightest and most nearly equal”

“When preparing your return, you should be sure to avoid common mistakes. The two most common taxpayer mistakes, states the IRS booklet, are (1) "failure to include a current address," and (2) "failure to be a large industry that gives humongous contributions to key tax-law-writing congresspersons."”

“Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top.”

“It is not wise for us to permit a few people on the Federal Reserve Board to have life and death power over our economy. My recommendation for reducing some of that power is to repeal legal tender laws and eliminate all taxes on gold, silver and platinum transactions. That way there would be money substitutes and the government money monopoly would be reduced and hence the ability to tax - some people would say steal from - us through inflation.”

“Punishing enemies and rewarding friends - politics Chicago style - seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and IRS's gift tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors. They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government. One thing they don't look like is the rule of law.”

“And what would help minority workers are the same things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a living wage, the education and training that lead to such jobs, labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth.”

“The lawyers have escaped most criticism [and undeservedly so]. The tax shelters [were approved by lawyers, who got paid huge commissions to do so] and every miscreant had a high-falutin' lawyer at his side. Why don't more law firms vote with their feet and not take clients who have signs on them that say, "I'm a skunk and will be hard to handle?" I've noticed that firms that avoid trouble over long periods of time have an institutional process that tunes bad clients out. Boy, if I were running a law firm, I'd want a system like that because a lot of firms have a lot of bad clients.”

“I think the American people are gonna be reasonable with what do you do with someone who has been in this country for 10 or 12 years who hasn't otherwise violated our laws - because if they're a criminal they can't stay. They'll have to undergo a background check, pay a fine, start paying taxes. And ultimately, they'll given a work permit and that's all they're gonna be allowed to have for at least 10 years.”

“I'm the strongest advocate you can imagine for doing things honestly and paying your taxes. Take advantage of every tax break you're legally entitled to. But I follow the letter of the law, because the consequences are severe if you're caught. I was a perpetrator at one time and suffered severe consequences. It is difficult in some places, but if you live in places like California, move somewhere else to save some money.”

“I’m not only a lawyer, I have a post-doctorate degree in federal tax law from William and Mary. I’ve worked in serious scholarship ... my husband and I have raised five kids, we’ve raised 23 foster children. We’ve applied ourselves to education reform. We started a charter school for at-risk kids.”

“Due to the major demographic changes we have gone through in the last few years in this country, we will be a majority/minority nation and there are a large number of people who do not like that. Donald Trump has tapped into those people's fears because he comes from the extreme right wing part of the Republican Party, as does Ted Cruz. They believe that we should cut taxes to wealthy Americans and enforce anti immigrant laws. They don't believe in Education or Social Security, they would end it and change it and privatize it.”

“Instead of ending U.S. military aid to the 23rd wealthiest country to use for its consistent violations of international law and human rights, we see the Obama administration escalating the annual amount of aid, so that Israel will now start each year with almost $4 billion, with $3.8 billion a year of military aid coming from our tax money to support its military, without any restrictions on how it makes - how it uses that money, what weapons in the U.S. it's able to buy.”

“What does have a chance of becoming law is a process that begins with securing the border. Currently the border is not secure and not just immigrants are coming across, but also drugs, weapons a whole series of problems. And I think that if you can prove to the American people that illegal immigration is under control, I think that the American people are willing to do something very reasonable about people who have been here for many years, who are not criminals, who are going to pay a fine, who are going to pay taxes, who are working.”

“It's dark and it's divisive - deporting 11 million people, talking about law and order, calling every group of people in America names, talking about cutting taxes on the wealthy, feeling like Donald Trump can bring more nuclear weapons into the world - I mean, everything he's talked about is a form of change.”

“As a businessman, Donald Trump has been associated with some of the worst excesses of a particular style of value-extracting and asset stripping capitalism: set up businesses, let them fail, avoid paying suppliers, use bankruptcy laws to avoid taxes for decades, then set up another business somewhere else. It is this model that is the cause of many problems we see today.”