Courtesy of Julian Block

Except for the deadline disadvantaged, most of us already have filled out and submitted our 1040 forms, an annual chore that is one of the few constants in our continually changing society.

In recognition of that shared ordeal, here are some quotations about America's tax system—whether negative (almost invariably) or positive (seldom). The quotes bring to vibrant life a dry subject that has been the source of fierce political contention.

The Firm, John Grisham’s best-selling thriller, became a 1993 film that starred Tom Cruise as a young lawyer seduced into working for a snazzy law firm that launders money for the Mafia. In the movie version, a mob mouthpiece describes tax law as “a game we teach the rich how to play so they can stay rich. The IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.”

From a 1974 novel, The Partners, by Louis Auchincloss, a practicing lawyer who wrote polished novels of manners about the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, American upper class: “You are behind the times, Ronny. Everything today is taxes. Common law, constitutional law, even criminal law. They are all soaked in tax questions. What better seat on the grandstand of life can I offer you than that of tax counsel? . . . Public and private morality, where are they? Submerged in a sea of exemptions, of write-offs, of loopholes, of fabricated balance sheets and corporate hocus-pocus. What is hospitality but deductibility? What is charity, charity that was greater than faith and hope, but the taxpayer’s last stand? Who is the figure behind every great man, the individual who knows his ultimate secrets? A father confessor? Hell, no. The tax expert!”

"Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today." —Herman Wouk

"Dear Mr. President, Internal Revenue regulations will turn us into a nation of bookkeepers. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business." —Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964

As Plato foresaw in The Republic nearly 2,500 years ago, "When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income."

Gone with the Wind is a romantic, panoramic portrait of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods in Georgia, not about taxes. But in her 1936 novel, Margaret Mitchell threw in the observation that “Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them!”

Fran Lebowitz on dogs: “A dog who thinks he is man's best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer”; and on children: “If you are truly serious about preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract—teach him to deduct.”

"To tax and to please, no more than to love and be wise, is not given to man." —Edmund Burke (1729-1797), British political writer, statesman, and supporter of the American Revolution

Leo Tolstoy’s most popular work, Anna Karenina, is the story of Anna, a fashionable married woman, who has an affair with Count Vronsky, a liaison that ends horribly when she throws herself under the wheels of a railroad train. What if a film adaptation retains one of the most famous suicides in literary history, but shifts the locale from nineteenth-century Russia to contemporary America? A suicidal Anna might tell the Count, "Oh, Vronsky, not another April 15th. I just can't bear it. Where’s the train?" —With apologies to Christopher Durang, whose article, "Hope for the Seasonally Challenged," appeared in the New York Times, December 23, 1994.