Quotes from Daniel Hannan

European pantywaists might keep voting for high-spending governments, but the U.S. was founded on a popular revolt against taxation.

One way to think of the tax system is as a massive Swiss cheese. Each hole is an exemption created by a chancellor in pursuit of good headlines - a hole waiting to be filled by the clever accountants who work for Starbucks or Jimmy Carr.

I just think there is so much irrational pessimism in the world.

The populists always fail in their own terms. Let me be more specific, the protectionists always fail. They always end up delivering the sharpest fall in living standards to the people who are their biggest supporters.

The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.

If you vote for candidates who think it's the role of the state to provide health care, don't complain when your hospitals are as badly run as everything else run by the state.

You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.

That's the problem with very high taxes - they don't redistribute wealth; they redistribute people.

Conservatives the world over need to grasp the difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes the two positions happen to coincide; often they don't.

The complexity of a tax system is every bit as damaging to competitiveness as the overall tax rate. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more time we have to take off work to comply with it.

The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were both, in a sense, complaining about the same thing, namely the use of public money to rescue failed banks.

Whenever the debate moves on to hard numbers - our deficit with Europe, our surplus with the rest of the world, our Brussels budget contributions, the tiny part of our economy dependent on sales to the EU, the vast part subjected to EU regulation - Euro-enthusiasts quickly shift their ground and start harrumphing about influence.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around 20,000 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Prime Minister, I see you've already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely, the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate.

Progressives and conservatives alike lean, unconsciously, towards particular conclusions, and then scrabble around to rationalise those conclusions to themselves.

The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

The idea seems to be to use the next treaty talks to strike a grand bargain: Britain will be helpful to those states wishing to establish a fiscal union among themselves if, in exchange, we can amicably derogate from the aspects of the EU which we dislike.

The fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves doesn't devalue what he wrote.

Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

There comes a point when threats become so overblown that they serve to irk rather than to frighten.

I'm going to devote myself full time to securing and then winning a referendum on leaving the E.U.

There is sort of a hobbit-like element to a lot of British people. They don't want to be told something until they have worked it out for themselves.

It's not often one gets the chance to write this but, when it comes to the bailouts, especially the euro bailouts, Marxists are right. Working people are being forced to support a privileged few.