
“The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.”
Source: Reaper Man
“The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.”
“But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. ”
“Death is the most convenient time to tax rich people.”
In Lord Riddell's Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, 1918-1923 (1933)
Later life
As quoted in The Times Herald, Norristown, Pennsylvania (1 December 1978)
Context: There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise … and yet we need taxes. We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don't need government at all. We do need to provide for certain essential government functions — the national defense function, the police function, preserving law and order, maintaining a judiciary. So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.
“In life only three things are certain: death, Adobe updates and taxes.”
13 May 2016
The Daily Show
Source: Visible at 00:05 #WeakDonald Trump Won't Release His Tax Returns http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cd7iyf/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah--weakdonald-trump-won-t-release-his-tax-returns, CC.com, 13 May 2016.
Letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy (13 November 1789)
First published in The Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin (1817) p.266 https://books.google.de/books?id=jY8EAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA266&dq=constitution
The Yale Book of Quotations quotes “‘Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes,” from Christopher Bullock, The Cobler of Preston (1716). The YBQ also quotes “Death and Taxes, they are certain,” from Edward Ward, The Dancing Devils (1724).
Epistles
2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)
“We may eliminate death someday but I doubt if we’ll ever eliminate taxes.”
Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 24, p. 406