National Debt

"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
        --Marcus Tullius Cicero, c 55 B.C.

"It [1991 Federal budget] contains almost 190,000 accounts. At a rate of one per minute, eight hours a day, it would take over a year to reflect upon these!"
        --Richard Darman, then Director of the Office of Management and Budget

"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing. I now deny their power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender. I know that to pay all proper expenses within the year would, in case of war, be hard on us. But not so hard as ten wars instead of one. For wars could be reduced in that proportion; besides that the State governments would be free to lend their credit in borrowing quotas."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"I place economy among the first and important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people in England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money."
        --P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores

"It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things."
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"If we do our deficit spending on weapons, at least we get weapons. Then if we need weapons, we have them. If we don't need them, no harm is done."
        --P.J. O'Rourke

"We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much."
        --Ronald Reagan

"The budget is a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical bean into it, and then tries to reach in and pull real beans out."
        --Will Rogers

"What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin."
        --Mark Twain