Taxed Quotes

In almost every instance, air and water quality goals were met more cheaply and quickly when we taxed pollution than when we tried to regulate it directly. ~ Bob Frank

The estate tax punishes years of hard work and robs families of part of their heritage by imposing a huge penalty on inheritance after death - a tax on money that has already been taxed. ~ Mike Fitzpatrick

'Green' cannot be allowed to become an excuse for stealth taxes. And nor should 'green taxes' be about punishment. Instead, they should represent a switch of emphasis. So if domestic flights are taxed, it should be on the absolute condition that the money is ploughed into improving the alternatives, such as trains. ~ Zac Goldsmith

McCain said the lower gas prices were sitting somewhere under the Gulf of Mexico. Obama said they were sitting in the bank accounts of companies like Exxon in the form of windfall profits to be taxed.

The formula was the same formula we see in every election: Republicans demonize government, sixties-style activism, and foreigners. Democrats demonize corporations, greed, and the right-wing rabble.

Both candidates were selling the public a storyline that had nothing to do with the truth. Gas prices were going up for reasons completely unconnected to the causes these candidates were talking about. What really happened was that Wall Street had opened a new table in its casino. The new gaming table was called commodity index investing. And when it became the hottest new game in town, America suddenly got a very painful lesson in the glorious possibilities of taxation without representation. Wall Street turned gas prices into a gaming table, and when they hit a hot streak we ended up making exorbitant involuntary payments for a commodity that one simply cannot live without. ~ Matt Taibbi

I'd like Americans to save their money, and not get taxed on their savings. ~ Mitt Romney

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

Just what do we tax under our current system? Work, that's what. Hard work and productivity. The harder you work, the more you achieve. The more you achieve, the more you're taxed. To make matters worse, under our "progressive" income tax system, the harder you work, the more severe the punishment actually is! ~ Neal Boortz

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. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Chia decided to change the subject. "What's your brother like? How old is he?" "Masahiko is seventeen," Mitsuko said. "He is a 'pathological - techno - fetishist - with - social - deficit," ' this last all strung together like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth running it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions updated automatically whenever she ported. "A what?" "Otaku," Mitsuko said carefully in Japanese. ~ William Gibson

If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can't work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter.
Let me in.
You do. ~ Jeanette Winterson

A regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king, who soon came to regard it as a right. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The American economy is driven by small business. And there's nothing basically to create incentives for small businesses. We've done no tax reform. They're the highest-taxed group in the country. And corporations can go anywhere they want and do whatever they want. Small businesses have to stay ... ~ Ed Rollins

No church property is taxed and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit. ~ Mark Twain

Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society. ~ Gore Vidal

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much. ~ Ronald Reagan

All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any other manner receive. ~ Sinclair Lewis

If you bring [tax] rates down, it makes it easier for small business to keep more of their capital and hire people. And for me, this is about jobs. I want to get America's economy going again. Fifty-four percent of America's workers work in businesses that are taxed as individuals. So when you bring those rates down, those small businesses are able to keep more money and hire more people. ~ Mitt Romney

That's where the economy is going. It went somewhere. Just not to America. And the money made? That went to the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. Not back here. Never to be taxed. ~ Henry Rollins

Licensed, regulated, taxed, safe. People pay for therapy, for physical training," he added, nodding at the board. "For spiritual guidance, and so on and so on. People pay for all manner of basic needs, and others train to provide those needs. Sex is a basic need. ~ J.D. Robb

I used to get taxed on my allowance. Yeah, I've been taxed since I was a little kid. And at the end of the year I had to pick a charity to donate my taxes to. ~ Lauren Conrad

The American people are not just being taxed to death; they're being taxed after death. But, no one should have to sell the life's work of a parent or a loved one just to pay the federal government. ~ J. D. Hayworth

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator. ~ Lawrence Lessig

So every dollar of income that I have that is potentially taxed away is a dollar I can't put in my company to create a job. My entire company is around job creation. ~ Curt Schilling

We fought the Revolutionary War for no taxation without representation, it seems to me that we are much worse off today, because we are heavily taxed, and only the king's corporations control this Country, together with mob rule, of the special interests. ~ James Montgomery

Some are taxed on their success, true. Some are taxed on their survival, also true. ~ Benjamin Kane Ethridge

No nation ever taxed itself into prosperity. ~ Rush Limbaugh

People who renovate and improve homes are penalized by being taxed more for creating value and improving the neighborhood. ~ Mark Noble

The American people I talk to don't spend every moment thinking, 'How can I tax my neighbor more than they're being taxed?' They say, 'How can I get a good job? How can my kids get good jobs? How can seniors have a confidence in their future when they know that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt?' ~ Mitt Romney

I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched in so many giddy offences as He hath generally taxed their whole their whole sex withal. ~ William Shakespeare

The growing policy-reform movement is a broad church. It includes everyone from ganja-smoking Rastafarians to free-market fundamentalists and all in between. There are socialists who think the drug war hurts the poor, capitalists who see a business opportunity, liberals who defend the right to choose, and fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it. The movement can't agree on much other than that the present policy doesn't work. People disagree on whether legalized drugs should be controlled by the state, by corporations, by small businessmen, or by grow-your-own farmers, and on whether they should be advertised, taxed, or just handed out free in white boxes to addicts. ~ Ioan Grillo

I believe in a wall between church and state so high that no one can climb over it. When religion controls government, political liberty dies; and when government controls religion, religious liberty perishes. Every American has the constitutional right not to be taxed or have his tax money expended for the establishment of religion. For too long the issue of government aid to church related organizations has been a divisive force in our society and in the Congress. It has erected communication barriers among our religions and fostered intolerance. ~ Sam Ervin

The problem with our deficit is not because Americans are taxed too little. The problem with the deficit is because Washington spends too much money. We have got to stop spending money we don't have. ~ Paul Ryan

No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity. ~ Rush Limbaugh

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

Working income is taxed at a higher rate than the non-working income ~ Munir Moon

It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists' tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King. Berkeley himself, returning to England years earlier to protest the English Navigation Acts, which gave English merchants a monopoly of the colonial trade, had said: . . . we cannot but resent, that forty thousand people should be impoverish'd to enrich little more than forty Merchants, who being the only buyers of our Tobacco, give us what they please for it, and after it is here, sell it how they please; and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper rates, than any other men have slaves. . . . ~ Howard Zinn

To cut 1930s jobless, FDR taxed corps and rich. Govt used money to hire many millions. Worked then; would now again. Why no debate on that? ~ Richard D. Wolff

By today's standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today's U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.. ~ Joseph Sobran

Companies that pollute should be taxed so that a product's cost to society is reflected in the price of that product. ~ Eliot Spitzer

The rates of taxation climb and the levels of capital decline, until the only remaining wealth beyond the reach of the regime is the very protein of human flesh, and that too is finally taxed, bound, and gagged, and brought to the colossal temple of the state - a final sacrifice of carnal revenue to feed the declining elite. ~ George Gilder

When the fountains of government [borrowing] abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to public works, then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world. ~ John T. Flynn

members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet pp89-90 ~ Richard M. Rorty

If our Trade be taxed, why not our Lands, or Produce in short, everything we possess? They tax us without having legal representation. ~ Samuel Adams

The most powerful nation on earth should be able to pass a fair, effective immigration law that combines compassion with responsibility and does not injure hard working Americans who are taxed up to here. ~ Bill O'Reilly

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others. ~ Oscar Wilde

We don't need more politicians insisting we have deficits because you're not taxed enough. Those deficits ballooned from an economy that didn't grow enough and from 50 years of government spending too much. ~ Ronald Reagan

When Bill Archer (R-Tex.) was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he routinely quoted an informal survey of five hundred international companies located in Europe and Japan. These companies were asked, "What would you do in your long-term planning if the United States eliminated all taxes on capital and labor and taxed only personal consumption?" Eighty percent - that's four hundred out of five hundred companies - said they would build their next plant in America. The remaining 20 percent - the other hundred companies - said they would relocate their business to America altogether. ~ Neal Boortz

I'd like somebody to get rid of the death tax. That's what I want. I don't want to get taxed just because I died. I just don't think it's right. If I give something to my kid, I already paid the tax. Why should I have to pay it again because I died? ~ Whoopi Goldberg

The Goddess spoke to all the dead. She was beloved for it. It seemed she passed on that gift to you. Oh, it taxed her immensely, but she tried to set as many to rest as she could. Sometimes it only takes one word of kindness, you know, to set a soul at ease. ~ Leanna Renee Hieber

We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much. ~ Ronald Reagan

In Colma, a suburb of San Francisco, California there's a proposal pending to tax ... the dead. If proponents get their way, grave sites will be taxed $5 dollars - per grave, per year - for eternity. In Colma the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of roughly 1000-to-1, including such notables as: Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, and William Randolph Hearst. And they, apparently, haven't paid their fair share. For liberals, when it comes to taxes ... nothing is sacred. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. REpublicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive invenstment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

The rich pay more in total taxes now than ever before - ever. It's true. Just like it's true that when the rich are convinced they're going to be taxed more, they spend less. And when the top few percenters don't spend, there goes all your spending, because they account for half of all retail spending. ~ Neil Cavuto

All capitalists should be like Warren Buffett, and he says he should be taxed more. ~ Ed Asner

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost are and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

In a Bloomberg poll, 88% of respondents said that Wall Street bonuses should either be banned outright or taxed at 50%. Just 7% said they should remain an incentive. To put that 7% figure in perspective, 6% of Americans believe the moon landings were a hoax; 7% believe Elvis lives; 24% believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim; 41% believe in ESP; and 48% believe in creationism. Americans will believe anything, it seems-except the idea that incentivizing bankers at systemically important institutions to take big risks makes any sense at all. ~ Felix Salmon

Born free. Taxed to death. ~ Christopher Titus

The dual effect of high growth creating higher income that's taxed by government at all levels, combined with lessening demands placed on government that occurs during economic prosperity, is a worthy objective. ~ Jeb Bush

There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions. ~ Charles Baudelaire

I have issues with inheritance tax, particularly coming from a migrant family. My dad has worked incredibly hard all his life, so it seems odd to me that someone who has gone through that experience and has managed to save then gets taxed for dying. ~ Sanjeev Bhaskar

The Americans are right: there should not be taxation unless the people consent to it. And it should be fair, which means the nobility and clergy should be taxed as well. ~ Michelle Moran

Women's property has been taxed, equally with that of men's, to sustain colleges endowed by the states; but they have not been permitted to enter those high seminaries of learning. ~ Lucretia Mott

You'll note that politicians no longer spend money, they invest it. Don't worry about paying more to the [IRS]. You aren't being taxed; you're taking a plunge on a fly-by-night stock issue. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

You've taxed too much, borrowed too much and are a roadblock to reform. ~ David Cameron

We're the highest taxed nation in the world. Our middle class is just reeling from the taxes. And you know, if you think about it, the middle class and the workers of this country, who really built the country, they haven't had a raise in 12 years. They're making less now actually - to be even worse about it, they're making less now than they did 12 years ago. ~ Donald Trump

It's not a crime to wish for other worlds. You'll get taxed for it but they can't throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. 'You can't go backward,' 'You can't live in the past,' they tell you. Why not? 'You've got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,' they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It's a mediocritizing technique - trying to get rid of what I call 'past orthodoxies.' It's our past that makes us unique, therefore it's our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world - out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights - how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, 'Don't let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

Who are ever taxed? Individuals only. Who have property that can be taxed? Individuals only. Who can give their consent to be taxed? Individuals only. Who are ever taxed without their consent? Individuals only. Who, then, are robbed, if taxed without their consent? Individuals only. ~ Lysander Spooner

I got worries by the ton, getting cancer's only one. Over taxed and alimonied, tired of eating fried baloney. ~ Neil Diamond

Texans should not be taxed on our taxes. ~ Kay Bailey Hutchison

Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I take it your revolt is not engineered for the benefit of your fellow-nobles, or as an attempt to reestablish your mother's blood claim through the Calahanras family. Wherefore is it, then?"
I looked up in surprise. "There ought to be no mystery obscuring our reasons. Did you not trouble to read the letter we sent to Galdran Merindar before he sent Debegri against us? It was addressed to the entire Court, and our reasons were stated as plainly as we could write them--and all our names signed to it."
"Assume that the letter was somehow suppressed," he said dryly. "Can you summarize its message?"
"Easy," I said promptly. "We went to war on behalf of the Hill Folk, whose Covenant Galdran wants to break. But not just for them. We also want to better the lives of the people of Remalna: the ordinary folk who've been taxed into poverty, or driven from their farms, or sent into hastily constructed mines, all for Galdran's personal glory. And I guess for the rest of yours as well, for whose money are you spending on those fabulous Court clothes you never wear twice? Your father still holds the Renselaeus principality--or has he ceded it to Galdran at last? Isn't it, too, taxed and farmed to the bone so that you can outshine all the rest of those fools at Court?"
All the humor had gone out of his face, leaving it impossible to read. He said, "Since the kind of rumor about Court life that you seem to regard as truth also depicts us as inveterate liars, I will not wa ~ Sherwood Smith

Let me tell you what the Tea Party stands for. It stands for the fact that we are taxed enough already. ~ Michele Bachmann

Dora was having trouble with her income tax, for she was entangled in that curious enigma which said the business was illegal and then taxed her for it. ~ John Steinbeck

If a group of people - leaders - can convince a group of folk who barely have a pot to piss in that the rich shouldn't be taxed
THAT is leadership! ~ Lewis Black

We're the highest taxed in the world, we're the highest taxed country right now, and it's not even close. ~ Donald Trump

I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves. ~ Astra Taylor

So let me get this straight – this is a long sentence. We are going to be gifted with a health care plan that we are forced to purchase, and fined if we don't, which reportedly covers 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman doesn't understand it, passed by Congress, that didn't read it, but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that is broke. So what the blank could possibly go wrong? ~ Barbara Bellar

Men's virtues I have commended as freely as I have taxed their crimes. ~ John Dryden

In the laws of the land, she has no rights; in government she has no voice. And in spite of another principle recognized in this Republic, namely, that 'taxation without representation is tyranny,' she is taxed without being represented. ~ Ernestine Rose

...we know the curse that has been laid upon us--not the curse of bondage, but rather the curse of neglect. This country does not see, nor seek to remedy, the suffering of the Negro, and we are taxed to bear the wrath of white inadequacy. ~ Justina Ireland

When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed. ~ Peter Schiff

It's time for the wealthy to pay their fair share before the middle class becomes the forgotten class.- And it's time for the banks to give back what they were given. There are those in politics, particularly those on the conservative side, who can't get enough of telling people that the wealthy one per cent must not be taxed because doing so kills jobs. The real job-killers are corporate greed and political expediency. It's time for working people in Maine and all across the country to take back the American dream. ~ Stephen King

There is one passage in the Scriptures to which all the potentates of Europe seem to have given their unanimous assent and approbation ... "There went out a decree in the days of Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Be checked for silence,
But never taxed for speech. ~ William Shakespeare

The arithmetic makes it plain that inflation is a far more devastating tax than anything that has been enacted by our legislature. The inflation tax has a fantastic ability to simply consume capital. It makes no difference to a widow with her saving in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income tax on her interest income during a period of zero inflation, or pays no income taxes during years of 5 percent inflation. Either way, she is 'taxed' in a manner that leave her no real income whatsoever. Any money she spends comes right out of capital. She would find outrageous a 120 percent income tax, but doesn't seem to notice that 5 percent inflation is the economic equivalent. ~ Warren Buffett

I do not find that I feel myself to be any different as an English subject than as an American. I have not the vote in either place, so I am not a citizen of either, and have no call to be patriotic. In fact, I do not see how women can ever feel like anything but aliens in whatever country they may live, for they have no part or lot in any, except the part and lot of being taxed and legislated for by men. ~ Hannah Whitall Smith

The oldest among Kashmiris often claim that their is nothing new about their condition, that they they have been slaves of foreign rulers since the sixteenth century, when the Moghul emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir and appointed a local governer to rule the state. In the chaos of post-Moghul India, the old empire rapidly disintegrating, Afghani and Sikh invaders plundered Kashmir at will. The peasantry was taxed and taxed into utter wretchedness; the cultural and intellectual life, which under indigenous rulers had produced some of the greatest poetry, music, and philosophy in the subcontinent, dried up. Barbaric rules were imposed in the early nineteenth century, a Sikh who killed a native of Kashmir was fined nothing more than two rupees. Victor Jacquemont, a botanist and friend of Stendahl's who came to the valley in 1831, thought that nowhere else in India were the masses as poor and denuded as they were in Kashmir. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I don't feel under-taxed in any way at all. ~ Jack Welch

Taxes," said rich dad. "You're taxed when you earn. You're taxed when you spend. You're taxed when you save. You're taxed when you die." "Why do people let the government do that to them?" "The rich don't," said rich dad with a smile. "The poor and the middle class do. ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn't necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee's appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers - a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s - and exchange information of value to their lives and business. Some took to using coffeehouses as their offices - as, most famously, at Lloyd's Coffee House on Lombard Street, which gradually evolved into Lloyd's insurance market. ~ Bill Bryson

Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction ~ William James

Mr. Edwards admired the well-built, pleasant house and heartily enjoyed the good dinner. But he said he was going on West with the train when it pulled out. Pa could not persuade him to stay longer.
"I'm aiming to go far West in the spring," he said. "This here, country, it's too settled up for me. The politicians are a-swarming in already, and ma'am if'n there's any worse pest than grasshoppers it surely is politicians. Why, they'll tax the lining out'n a man's pockets to keep up these here county-seat towns..."
"Feller come along and taxed me last summer. Told me I got to put in every last thing I had. So I put in Tom and Jerry, my horses, at fifty dollars apiece, and my oxen yoke, Buck and Bright, I put in at fifty, and my cow at thirty five.
'Is that all you got?' he says. Well I told him I'd put in five children I reckoned was worth a dollar apiece.
'Is that all?' he says. 'How about your wife?' he says.
'By Mighty!' I says to him. 'She says I don't own her and I don't aim to pay no taxes on her,' I says. And I didn't. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

But indeed an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland man; one that knew courtship too well, for there he fell in love. I have heard him read many lectures against it; and I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offenses as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal. ~ William Shakespeare

If telecom are seen as a rightful infrastructure for the growth of many other sectors in the economy and the multiplier force, then I think it doesn't deserve to be taxed so high. ~ Sunil Mittal

The death tax causes one-third of all family-owned small businesses to liquidate after the death of the owner. It is also an unfair tax because the assets have already been taxed once at their income level. ~ Ric Keller

taxed to the limit the pitiless logic ~ John Steinbeck

As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where one of the most needed qualities is patience. ~ Ridley Pearson

The primordial blessing, 'increase and multiply', has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life. ~ Thomas Merton

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold ... 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 'T is only God may be had for the asking; There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer. ~ James Russell Lowell

The examen is a form of personal inventory. At day's end, spend time in prayerful reflection on your day: your comings and goings, routines and disruptions, work and play, discoveries and disappointments. Think about who you met, or missed. Think about your moments of aloneness. In all, ask two questions: when was I most alive, most present, most filled and fulfilled today? And when was I most taxed, stressed, distracted, depleted today? A simpler, and more spiritually focused, version of those questions: when did I feel closest to God, and when farthest? ~ Mark Buchanan