Tax Resistance Quotes

It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.

Taxes are never popular.

My finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes that they should be paying higher taxes.

We do not pull in and fill up. And I'll tell you why we don't. It's because I don't buy one goddamn drop of gas in the state of Michigan. We'll coast and push this goddamn car to the Ohio line before I give this state a nickel of my money.

Opposing taxes is a key conservative value.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Raising property taxes in Alabama is never going to happen. The people are never going to vote for that. I don't like property taxes, either.

There never has been a new tax that met with public enthusiasm.

Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.

There is the great, silent, continuous struggle: the struggle between the State and the Individual; between the State which demands and the individual who attempts to evade such demands. Because the individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint or hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws, or go to war.

They are all afraid to face high taxation to pay for the war. The rich won't stand it—and the poor can't stand it.

If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

The Internal Revenue Service is more ruthless than the Gestapo. Abolish the IRS! Stamp out organized crime!

I don't give my money to the government.

If I could effect a juncture with the other Indian tribes of California, and commence an attack upon all the Americans wherever we could find them that the Californians would join with us and help me driving the Americans from the country. … I might revenge myself for the payment of taxes, which has been demanded of the Indian tribes. The Indians think the collection of taxes from them to be a very unjust measure.

No one is patriotic about taxes.

Taxes on acquired wealth would be the fairest solution. But such taxes have met an invincible resistance among the possessors, who are the most powerful. … The selfishness of possessing classes is not reducible. We have to adopt to it.

We are told that this is an odious and unpopular tax. I never knew a tax that was not odious and unpopular with the people who paid it.

We want the benefits of government services ranging from security in our old age to the best national defense possible, but we scream when the bill for these services comes due in the form of higher taxes.

Withholding of payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.

1st, we ask not to put yokes on our necks that we cannot bear, and don't make us do what is against our religion, and don't ask us to pay poll tax forever and ever as long as there is sun and moon, and don't ask taxes for land which are our rights of the Moro people, including all that grows (is planted) in Jolo and its islands.

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.... If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

… persons, whose design, from the beginning of their opposition to the Stamp Act, was to throw off all subordination and connection with Great Britain; who meant by every fiction, falsehood and fraud, to delude the people from their due allegiance, to throw the subsisting Governments into anarchy, to incite the ignorant and vulgar to arms, and with those arms to establish American Independence --- were Congregational and Presbyterian republicans, or men of bankrupt fortunes, overwhelmed in debt to the British merchants.

[T]he tax code has been piling up, year after year, a symbol of everything gone wrong in America, of arrogant rulers and lost freedom, just waiting for us to pick the whole thing up and heave it away. It has to happen. Free people can put up with such laws only for so long.