Banking and Monetary Policy

"Government is the only agency that can take a valuable commodity like paper, slap some ink on it, and make it totally worthless"
Ludwig von Mises

"Under the Federal Reserve Act panics are scientifically created. The present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical equation."
Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, The Economic Pinch, 1921

"Give me control of a nation's money supply and I care not who makes its laws."
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of Rothschild banking dynasty

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again...Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."
Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England, 1928-1941

"It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Henry Ford

"We in the Congress have a moral and constitutional obligation to protect the value of the dollar and to understand why it is so important to the economy that a central bank not be given the unbelievable power of inflating a currency at will and pretending that it knows how to fine-tune an economy through this counterfeit system of money."
Ron Paul, M.D. and U.S. Congressman (R-Texas)

"If all bank loans were paid, there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation. We are absolutely without a permanent money system."
Robert Hemphill, Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
John Maynard Keynes

"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America rise, not from defects in the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation."
John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1787

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, 1802

"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay...If such a law is not abolished immediately, it will spread: multiply and develop into a system."
Bastiat

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country." "[The United States is] no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men".
Woodrow Wilson, referring to his signature enacting the Federal Reserve Board in 1913

"I was as secretive, indeed I was as furtive as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would have been wasted. If it were exposed, that our particular group [of wealthy bankers] had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress".
Frank A. Vanderlip, one of the members of the secret Jekyll Island meeting where the Federal Reserve was conceived in 1910

Government

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."
George Orwell, “1984”, part 3, chapter 3

"Every time we ask government to do something for us it does something to us."
Unknown

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine, 1776

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
Mark Twain, 1881

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
H.L. Mencken

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of Constitutional power."
Thomas Jefferson

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
James Madison

"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
Former US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall

"Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrant."
James Madison

"Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power.... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
Thomas Jefferson

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable."
H. L. Mencken

"All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."
I. F. Stone

"A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves."
Edward R. Murrow

"The preservation of a free government requires, not merely that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained, but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great barrier which defends the rights of the people. The rulers who are guilty of such encroachment exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are TYRANTS. The people who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them and are slaves...."
James Madison

"Whensoever the federal government assumes unconstitutional powers, a "nullification of the act is THE rightful remedy"."
Thomas Jefferson

"A government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have...The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
Thomas Jefferson

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
George Washington

"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence."
John Locke

"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers... 'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
Friedrich August von Hayek

"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose."
Frederick Douglass

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority...There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Noah Webster

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
Lord Acton

"We need a revolution every 20 years just to keep government honest."
Thomas Jefferson

"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide."
Samuel Adams

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
John F. Kennedy

"We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent."
James Paul Warburg - February 17, 1950 to the United States Senate

"It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error."
United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
Frederick Douglass

Imperialism

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
Voltaire

"I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I’m willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war."
Albert Einstein

"We'll know when our disinformation program is complete when everything the American believes is false."
William Casey, CIA Director

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".
Josef Stalin

"Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death".
Adolph Hitler

"A history of false flag attacks used to manipulate the minds of the people! "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality...we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors."
Karl Rove, Chief consultant and policy advisor to George W. Bush

Liberty

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H. L. Mencken

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
Upton Sinclair

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle."
James Madison

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
Voltarine de Cleyre

"Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant--they have been cheated; asleep--they have been surprised; divided--the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson?…the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it....It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free."
James Madison

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
William Pitt

"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions would be a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
Thomas Jefferson

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason."
Frederick Douglass

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson, 1816

"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck."
Frederick Douglass

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress."
Frederick Douglass

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Patrick Henry

"I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted."
Frederick Douglass

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."
Daniel Webster

"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
Samuel Adams

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, Architect of the First American Revolution

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground."
Frederick Douglass

"A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."
Thomas Jefferson

"Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."
Thomas Paine

"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
Frederick Douglass

Philosophical

“Just look at us. Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom.”
Michael Ellner

"Reality is merely an illusion - albeit a persistent one."
Albert Einstein

"When you can see through the illusion you are the solution."
Unknown

"History shows us that people who end up changing the world are always nuts - until they are right and then they are geniuses."
John Elliot

"The more real you get the more unreal the world gets."
John Lennon

"Wisdom is knowing how little we know."
Socrates

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Mark Twain

"The things you own end up owning you."
Tyler Durden

"Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
George Orwell

"All paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value, zero."
Voltaire

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
Frederic Bastiat

"All a great power has to do to destroy itself is persist in trying to do the impossible."
Stephen Vizinczey

"First, they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
Mahatma Gandhi

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
Carl Sagan

"...when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Sherlock Holmes

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Martin Luther King

"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
Adolf Hitler

"You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
Ayn Rand

"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion- in the long run, these are the only people who count."
Robert Heinlein

"Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
Eleanor Roosevelt

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken

"It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we dont get on the wrong track or try to do too much."
Steve Jobs

"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
Thomas Jefferson

"There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men."
Edmund Burke

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."
Chinese proverb

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
Edmund Burke

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead

"Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get."
Frederick Douglass

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
Thomas Jefferson

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I should do and, with the help of God, I will do."
Everett Hale

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead

"The day we see truth and do not speak is the day we begin to die."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
James Madison

"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
Isaac Newton

"In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
Ayn Rand

"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."
Thomas Jefferson

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
Arthur Schopenhauer

"It ain't what ya don't know that hurts ya. What really puts a hurtin' on ya is what ya knows for sure, that just ain't so."
Uncle Remus

"Seek the truth or hide your head in the sand. Both require digging."
Andrew Nolan

Politics

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method."

"Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still persue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies."
Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966.

Right to Bear Arms

"The [second] amendment, ... was meant to be a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and as a necessary and efficient means of regaining rights when temporarily overturned by usurpation."

"The Right is General. -- It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been elsewhere explained, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. But the law may make provision for the enrollment of all who are fit to perform military duty, or of a small number only, or it may wholly omit to make any provision at all; and if the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of this guaranty might be defeated altogether by the action or neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check."
Thomas Cooley, Justice of The Michigan Supreme Court, in 'Principles Of Constitutional Law' (1880)

"The importance of this article [the 2nd amendment] will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
United States Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, in 'Commentaries On The Constitution Of The United States' (1833)

"[The right to keep and bear arms] may be considered as the true palladium of liberty .... The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. ..."

"The congress of the United States possesses no power to regulate, or interfere with the domestic concerns, or police of any state: it belongs not to them to establish any rules respecting the rights of property; nor will the constitution permit any prohibition of arms to the people;..."
Saint George Tucker, close friend of Thomas Jefferson and Justice of the Virginia Supreme Court, in his edition of 'Blackstone's Commentaries On The Law' (1803)

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
Thomas Jefferson

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Thomas Jefferson

"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
Thomas Jefferson

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
Mahatma Gandhi

"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
George Mason

"Gun bans don't disarm criminals, gun bans attract them."
Walter Mondale

"Try to halt violence by restricting gun ownership and you won't halt violence. But you will create entire classes of new criminals - people who make paperwork errors, violate technical specification of the law, or rebel against the new restrictions. And you'll create new bureaus, new enforcement arms, new prisons to punish them. You'll make hordes of lawyers and bureaucrats very happy. Organized criminals will be grateful to the naive moral crusaders ("useful idiots") as they profit by selling an illegal product. And ordinary street criminals will bless fools, legislators, and "leaders" for making their job so much safer."
JPFO's "Bill of Rights Sentinel", Fall 2001

"Those who hammer their guns into plough shares shall plough for those who don't."
Thomas Jefferson

"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"
Patrick Henry

"...arms...discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. ...Horrid mischief would ensue were (the law-abiding) deprived the use of them."
Thomas Paine

"We should not forget that the spark which ignited the American Revolution was caused by the British attempt to confiscate the firearms of the colonists."
Patrick Henry

"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; ..."
Samuel Adams

"Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence ... from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable ... the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good."
George Washington

"An armed man is a citizen. A disarmed man is a subject."
Anonymous

Stateless Society

"Each and every person who advocates "government" in any form - whether liberal, conservative, moderate, independent, communist, fascist, constitutionalist, or any other flavor - believes that representives of "authority" should on a larger scale, commit acts which, if done by anyone else, would be widely recognized as unjust and immoral. All statists believe that people who makeup government have an exemption from basic human morality, and not only may do things which others have no right to do, but should and must do such things, for the (supposed) good of society. The type and degree of aggression varies, but all statists advocate aggression."
Larken Rose - "The Most Dangerous Superstition" page 130

"Ironically, statists of all political stripes lament the influence that "lobbyists" and "special interests" have over politicians, ignoring the fact that every voter is a special interest, and every campaign contributor is a lobbyist. Once people accept the premise that "government" has the right to forcibly micromanage society, perpetual competition between groups each throwing money and favors at politicians to try to get their way, is inevitable."
Larken Rose - "The Most Dangerous Superstition" page 130

Taxes

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of squawking."
Jean-Baptiste Colbert

"Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, wars are raised to carry on taxes."
Thomas Paine

"There are two distinct classes of men...those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes."
Thomas Paine

"Reality is merely an illusion - albeit a persistent one."
Albert Einstein