Draft Quotes

Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.

This system of military conscription … is not only inconsistent with the provisions and spirit of the Constitution, but also with all the principles of civil liberty.

I hope my own children never have to fight a war.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world

I had been told I might be drafted in the fourth round. 'Great,' I said at the time.

It was 1943. The U.S. had already entered World War II, so I decided to join the army.

All able bodied male citizens … are hereby declared to be the National Forces.

It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be US Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the senate.

A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

You think about when I went to Miami. I played as a freshman, I go in and compete to be a starter, I tear my ACL. Come back, I start, I get off to a good couple of games and I get hurt again. You hear everybody saying, 'Oh, he's done.' I get drafted in the third round. People still said I got drafted too high, saying I'll only play three years.

I was 20, and my reality was that people either went to college full-time, or they were draftable. The dear friends that I went to high school with that didn't go to college eventually wound up in Vietnam, and I noticed that they came home different. I was in Ohio during the Vietnam War era.

I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.

I have never had a problem with national service. I am not sure the draft is the way to go about it, but I am positive that you live in a society and you take from this society, which every citizen here does. You owe something back to this country, and that should be paid back in some form of national service.

[On journalists:] We are a noisy, imperfect lot, struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history.

The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.

It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

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.

A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, "Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.

When I appeared before the draft board examiner during World War II, he asked me if I thought I could kill. "I don't know about strangers," I replied, "but friends, certainly."

The draft is the corollary of militarism and militarism spells death to democracy.

Registration is a World War II response, and we need a 1980 solution.

Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%.

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.