Compulsory Service Quotes

Conscription would amount to the sacrifice of nine-tenths of our moral case in this war. It would not only amount to an admission—wholly unjustified—that the heart of the country is not in the war…. It will change the basis of our participation. It will no longer be the war of the British people; it will be the war of the British governing classes.

I was going to get drafted, but I didn't really want to go into the Army.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

I should not care to live half-frozen in a trench, up to my middle in water, for three or four months, because someone in authority said I ought to shoot Germans. But if I were a Frenchman I should do it, because I would have been accustomed to the idea by my compulsory military service.

We may need to change the way we think. As in Israel, I think there should be a mandatory draft, where you go away for the service of your country for three years.

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

I was honestly willing to accept compulsory military service, provided that the voluntary system had first been tried out, and had failed to supply the men needed and who could still be spared from industry, and were numerically worth troubling about.

Would you rather lead an army of slaves?

You dare not—at least I hope you dare not—attempt a conscription to fill the ranks of your regular army.

In my day, when I was a young kid, army duty was compulsory in South Africa or you go to jail. I had the choice, so I spent a year in the entertainment unit, and outside of doing shows - and I used to write for, arrange for the big band - outside of doing that, I actually had a rock band in the army.

In the event of a war for the defense of our nation and its liberties, there shall be a conscription of wealth as well as a conscription of men.

I've never been a soldier. In Denmark, at 18, as a male, you go in a draw, and if they pick you, you go and serve for a year. I didn't.

As a little boy of eleven I entered the Cadet Corps. I was not particularly eager to become a Cadet, but my father wished it. So my wishes were not consulted.

Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.

At 18, they're old enough to drive. The girls enter university, and the boys enter into National Service. Since they have a duty to defend our country, these 18-year-olds should also have the right to elect their leaders. They are mature enough.

New Yorkers should know that no one in the Administration, at the Department of Defense, or at the Selective Service System is advocating the reinstatement of the mandatory draft in any form.

A small country like Israel has compulsory military training. But countries like India, that are so much bigger, have no compulsory military training, so people don't understand how the military functions. They have no knowledge of how it works, no respect for it.

Conscription is the cemetery where every vestige of your liberty is to be buried.

The draft is the largest educational institutional in the world.

When I was 18, I went into the army as a payroll clerk because otherwise I was headed for Korea.

This is the first step on the odious ground of conscription—a plan sir, which never will and never ought to be submitted to by this country while it retains one idea of civil freedom.

I am a product of the draft.

There can be no army without men. Men can be had voluntarily or involuntarily. We have ceased to obtain them voluntarily: and to obtain them involuntarily, is the draft—the conscription.

If your sons must be torn from you by conscription, consign them to the care of God; but let there be no volunteers except for defensive war.

Each man ... shall serve for a training and service period of 12 consecutive months unless sooner discharged, except that whenever the Congress has declared that the national interest is imperiled, such 12-month period may be extended by the President to such time as may be necessary in the interests of national defense.