Elizabeth Warren Quotes

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there. Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.

No sane person enjoys paying tax... money, after all, is a very nice thing to have. But it's the price we all pay for so many vital things in this country - and those of us lucky enough to have a bit more should be proud to be paying a little bit more as well.

I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

As far as I'm concerned, the people who aren't paying taxes don't get to run around claiming that they built everything, that the built the roads and that they built the bridges and so forth.

Those who have been most fortunate in amassing wealth in our country should return a portion to the nation, since in many ways they have benefitted the most from our American way of life.

We may pay high taxes but if it means that many hard working people have better lives, I am glad to do so.

But without a caring society, without each citizen voluntarily accepting the weight of responsibility, government is destined to grow even larger, taking more of your money, burrowing deeper into your lives.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

You shouldn't get to live in society and give nothing back. People complain about their taxes, yet they do nothing for the community. That makes me furious.

That's why I'm very proud of being American. I'm proud to pay taxes. I pay a lot of taxes, but it sure beats the alternative.

The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

It's a privilege to pay taxes. Yeah! It's not a political question, folks. We have to pay for stuff.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

Fair tax does not mean we don't want to encourage wealth creation. Wealth creation is how we raise the money to pay for world class schools and hospitals, for proper care of the weak, and dignity for the elderly.

Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.

People think of taxes as money just being robbed from you. They don't consider the benefits of paying taxes. The benefits that they get and also the benefit of just being a part of a large group of people: a town, or a city, or a country, or a society that allegedly should stand together and all try to help each other.

I believe that the role of limited government should be looking after the needs of veterans, the elderly, children and those institutions that improve the quality of life for struggling families - I don't believe that government should bend to serve the needs of subsidized multi-national corporations and entitled billionaires.

We need government to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves.

Those who are more influential because they have greater share of goods and common services should feel responsible for the weaker and be ready to share with them all they possess

Citizenship is not a transaction where you put your taxes in and take your services out. It is a relationship.

We want public services but we do not want to pay for them