Thomas Paine

One extreme produces the other: to make one rich many must be made poor; neither can the system be supported by other means.

The peer and the beggar are often of the same family.

Every aristocratical family has an appendage of family beggars hanging round it, which in a few ages, or a few generations, are shook off, and console themselves with telling their tale in almshouses, workhouses, and prisons.

Primogeniture ought to be abolished, not only because it is unnatural and unjust, but because the country suffers by its operation.

As hereditary estates, the law has created the evil, and it ought also to provide the remedy.

Let it be sufficient to remedy the evil by putting them in a condition of descending again to the community by the quiet means of apportioning them among all the heirs and heiresses of those families.

But the chief object of this progressive tax (besides the justice of rendering taxes more equal than they are) is, as already stated, to extirpate the overgrown influence arising from the unnatural law of primogeniture, and which is one of…

The aristocracy has screened itself too much, and this serves to restore a part of the lost equilibrium.

The object is not so much the produce of the tax as the justice of the measure.

I know not why any plant or herb of the field should be a greater luxury in one country than another; but an overgrown estate in either is a luxury at all times, and, as such, is the proper object of taxation.

One thing is called a luxury at one time, and something else at another; but the real luxury does not consist in the article, but in the means of procuring it, and this is always kept out of sight.

When taxes are proposed, the country is amused by the plausible language of taxing luxuries.