Quotes & Sayings About Tax Returns

I've forgotten the birthdays of everyone close to me. I have forgotten to pay bills, file tax returns on time, go to meetings, and, every week, I forget to put the bins out. But I have never forgotten I want my lunch. — John Niven

I released 34 years of tax returns and 300,000 e-mails in my government record. To get the information from Hillary Clinton, you need to get a subpoena from the FBI. — Jeb Bush

Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one's house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the State, e.g., when filling out income tax returns. — Murray Rothbard

President Bush released his tax returns yesterday. He listed the economy as a liability. He gets to write that off. — Jay Leno

Index funds are ... tax friendly, allowing investors to defer the realization of capital gains or avoid them completely if the shares are later bequeathed. To the extent that the long-run uptrend in stock prices continues, switching from security to security involves realizing capital gains that are subject to tax. Taxes are a crucially important financial consideration because the earlier realization of capital gains will substantially reduce net returns. — Burton Malkiel

And it makes you wonder - how can a people incapable of selecting their own lightbulbs and toilets possess enough competence to vote for their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns? — Mark R. Levin

Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom. — David Foster Wallace

The IRS is currently considering a rule that would make it easier for tax preparers to disclose the private information contained in tax returns - including name, address, Social Security number, employer, income, and charitable donations. — Melissa Bean

Conservatives have long been suspicious that Romney isn't truly one of them. The release of his tax returns should settle the matter once and for all: He's not only to be accepted, but admired and emulated - and by liberals as well as conservatives. — John Podhoretz

Expeditions are escapism. The stuff that we're normally concerned about just doesn't matter out there. Tax returns, gas bill, none of it. Life becomes very simple, it's about moving in a certain direction - north if you're going north - staying warm and not getting eaten. That's it. — Ben Saunders

Plenty of funds have fine long-term returns despite being tax-inefficient and generally costly. But a dirty secret is this: Average, no-load fund investors do much worse than the funds - or the market. — Kenneth Fisher

Reports also suggest that Ernst and Young and other large tax preparation firms are sending tax returns overseas for processing. But the IRS has no control over tax information once it's been sent to India or another country. — Melissa Bean

All I'm doing is I'm filling out my tax returns - or my accountants are, and I'm paying whatever I'm supposed to pay, though I'm giving away a large amount of the money and that probably lowers my tax rate because I'm giving away so much money. But change the law, but don't blame me for the law. I'm not writing the law. I didn't write the law. — David Rubenstein

Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater's apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II
and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation's sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions. — David Frum

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns. — Herman Wouk

This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent. — Douglas Adams

Hiking taxes on the so-called wealthy would help send us into a recession because so many small businesses report their income on individual tax returns. If taxes are raised, they will be less likely to be able to hire new workers and make new capital investments. — Ronald Kessler

I know everybody's income and what everybody earns,
And I carefully compare it with the income-tax returns — W.S. Gilbert

The Cheerful Fairy was quite short and plump in a tweed skirt and shoes so sensible they could do their own tax returns, and was pretty much like the first teacher you get at school, the one who has special training in dealing with nervous incontinence and little boys whose contribution to the wonderful world of sharing consists largely of hitting a small girl repeatedly over the head with a wooden horse. In fact, this picture was helped by the whistle on a string around her neck and a general impression that at any moment she would clap her hands. The tiny gauzy wings just visible on her back were probably just for show, but the wizards kept on staring at her shoulder. — Terry Pratchett

School performance, public health, crime rates, clinical depression, tax compliance, philanthropy, race relations, community development, census returns, teen suicide, economic productivity, campaign finance, even simple human happiness - all are demonstrably affected by how (and whether) we connect with our family and friends and neighbours and co-workers. — Robert D. Putnam

President Obama released his tax returns. It turns out he made $900,000 less in 2011 then he did in 2010. You know what that means? Even Obama is doing worse under President Obama. — Jay Leno

I am outraged that a House member has tried through this provision to breach the traditional confidentiality of individual Americans' tax returns. There is no reason for this measure, and this last-minute act violates all principles of judgment and common sense. — John Warner

Meet every deadline! I think that those three words have much more meaning. Writing is a profession like anything else. Many aspiring writers assume that because writing is a creative profession that the same standards don't apply, but they do. It's the same as a doctor showing up three hours late for an appointment or an accountant missing the deadline to submit tax returns. — Ellie Alexander

There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the 'Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin. — James Lee Burke

The ownership of slaves became for many immigrants the single most important symbol of their success in the New World, although few of them ever participated in the economy of the large plantation. The small slaveholding culture of the colonial frontier had been largely responsible for the initial expansion of the antebellum South, and that culture persisted. The comments of travelers are confirmed by the census returns and tax records: these people only infrequently became large planters. Furthermore, their ethnicity survived until the last decades of the antebellum — James Oakes

The total dividend income declared in 1995 by the bottom 9.7 million Canadian tax-filers (47% of all those submitting tax returns) was $310 million. The estimated dividend income received by the Thomson family in 1995 from its 72% ownership share of the Thomson Corporation and its 22% ownership share of the Hudson's Bay Company was $310 million. — Jim Stanford

Arnold Schwarzenegger made his tax returns public, [and] now there's a problem about him stretching the truth. Apparently under occupation he put down 'actor.' — Jay Leno

Tax returns give you nothing. Tax returns give you no information. — Donald Trump

The only thing that was economic, I might say, about my music career, aside from the fact that I did everybody's tax returns in the band, was the decision I made to leave the music business on economic grounds. — Alan Greenspan

In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth. — Thomas Piketty

Even when all the paperwork-a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns-clearly indicates you're an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you're still somebody's daughter. — Kelly Corrigan

Mitt Romney was treated very unfairly. Mitt Romney didn't want to give his tax returns, because people don't understand returns that are complicated, and complex. And he didn't give it. He fought it, fought it, fought it, all the way into September. A month before the election, he gave his tax returns. And they picked out two items that were absolutely perfect. He did nothing wrong. And his returns are very much smaller than my returns. — Donald Trump

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. — Graham Greene

I'm not the only taxpayer who has no idea what he's sending to the IRS. This year, only 28 percent of all Americans will prepare their own tax returns, according to a voice in my head that invents accurate-sounding statistics. — Dave Barry

We prefer: large purchases (at least $5 million of after-tax earnings), demonstrated consistent earning power (future projections are of little interest to us, nor are "turn-around" situations), businesses earning good returns on equity while employing little or no debt, management in place (we can't supply it), simple businesses (if there's lots of technology, we won't understand it), an offering price (we don't want to waste our time or that of the seller by talking, even preliminarily, about a transaction when price is unknown). — Warren Buffett

Hollow then produced Kobel's tax returns for the past three years.
When Ringling objected, Hollow said to Judge Rollins, "Your Honor, a man who files a tax return is of sound mind."
"That's debatable," said the ultraconservative judge, drawing laughter from the courtroom. — Jeffery Deaver

Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta. — Hermann Weyl

My mother and father had so many ups and downs and stayed with each other and helped each other. My mother took in ironing and she was a waitress. My father was working in the factory and he did people's tax returns. — Patti Smith

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today. — Herman Wouk

Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of an income tax in principle. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a rise in the tax. We are very careful to pay no more than is necessary. And we hope - we very ardently hope - that after we have paid it there will still be enough left to live on. - from "A Slip of the Tongue" (The Weight of Glory) — C.S. Lewis

He [Mitt Romney] didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain, but obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look? — Harry Reid

If we give all of the people who filed incorrect tax returns the benefit of the doubt and assume that every single one of them simply made an honest mistake, then doesn't common sense tell us that maybe the tax code is just a little too complex? — Glenn Beck

You walk into any supermarket or any shopping mall and ask the public what they are worried about. Not one of them will tell you they are worried about 12 years of Mitt Romney's tax returns. — John Sununu

I'll release my tax returns when Barack Obama releases his college transcripts and the copy of his admission records to show whether he got any loans as a foreign student. When he releases that, talk to me about my tax returns. — Mike Huckabee

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness. — Ariel Dorfman