TAXES

Related Subjects: Duty, Government, Price

1. 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 a free Government.—GROVER CLEVELAND
   

2. Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments. If we can get rid of the former, we may easily bear the latter.—FRANKLIN, Letter on the Stamp Act
   

3. Taxes must neither apply to the laborer, nor to the soldier, nor to the poor, but only to the wealthy and rich.—FREDERICK THE GREAT
   

4. The delicate duty of devising schemes of revenue should be left where the Constitution has placed it—with the immediate representatives of the people.—WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, Inaugural Address
   

5. When there is an income-tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.—PLATO, The Republic
   

6. One sure way to determine the social conscience of a Government is to examine the way taxes are collected and how they are spent.—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
   

7. Cursed war and racking tax Have left us scarcely raiment to our backs.—SCOTT,
   The Search After Happiness
   

8. Men who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light.—SYDNEY SMITH, On American Debts
   

9. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.—SYDNEY SMITH, Review of Seybert's Annals of the United States