Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him."

~ T. Coleman Andrews  

"From each according to his abilities,
to each according to his needs."

~ Karl Marx  

"Here is my principle:
Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay.
That is the only American principle."

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt  

"Subsidies entail politicians’ taking the citizen’s
paycheck and then using it to buy his submission."

~ James Bovard  

"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government."

~ Grover Cleveland  

"As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom,
I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined
to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually
in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom."

~ Lyn Nofziger  

"The natural effort of every individual to better
his own condition is so powerful that it is alone,
and without any assistance, not only capable
of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity,
but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions
with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations."

~ Adam Smith  

"Congress will ever exercise their powers
to levy as much money as the people can pay.
They will not be restrained from direct taxes
by the consideration that necessity does not require them."

~ Melancton Smith  

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary,
too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting
itself into every corner and crevice of industry."

~ Thomas Paine  

"Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter -- by peaceful or revolutionary means -- into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"To tax the community
for the advantage of a class
is not protection, it is plunder."

~ Benjamin Disraeli  

"To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so ...

To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon