Excise Quotes

EXCISE, n.' A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom the excise is paid. (Samuel Johnson)
Back then, the excise tax was designed to be a luxury tax for people who owned telephones. View quote
Mike Fitzpatrick
If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of £10,000 then living there would be five men of £50,000, that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles II, that stage coaches would run from London to York in 24 hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels. View quote
Thomas Babington Macaulay
But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void-not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we? View quote
Charles Stross
The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed. View quote
Alan Keyes
In the current climate motorists have a long list of issues from which to choose to raise on the doorstep. Policies aimed at reducing emissions - like the changes to Vehicle Excise Duty or here in Manchester the proposals for congestion charges - are not without controversy. View quote
Lucy Powell
As per the age-old Customs and Central Excise Rules 1967, a person is allowed to carry only Rs 20,000 worth of gold. View quote
Vayalar Ravi
No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains To tax our labours and excise our brains. View quote
Charles Churchill (satirist)
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Minimum sales prices for alcohol are a startlingly bad idea. As with excise duties, the effects are regressive. (Nigel Farage)
Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious conflict... Mohammed Habib's excise in history-rewriting cannot stand the test of historical criticism on any score... The unanimous and entirely coherent testimony that the wars in Hindustan were religious wars of Muslims against Kafirs is a different matter altogether: denying this testimony is not a matter of small adjustments, but of replacing the well-attested historical facts with their diametrical opposite. Habib tried to absolve the ideology (Islam) of the undeniable facts of persecution and massacre of the Pagans by blaming individuals (the Muslims). The sources however point to the opposite state of affairs: Muslim fanatics were merely faithful executors of Quranic injunctions. Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam. View quote
Koenraad Elst