Military Conscription Quotes

Indeed, the Roman laws allowed no person to be carried to the wars but he that was in the soldiers' roll.

War is a racket.... The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription of the nation's manhood.... Let the officers and directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munitions makers and shipbuilders all be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to our lads in the trenches. Give capital 30 days to think it over and you will learn by that time there will be no war. That will stop the racket—that, and nothing else.

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.

The Vietnam War was happening, but Lubbock was... They put a pinch on it.

On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens.

We lay a mortgage on every unborn child for a hundred and more years to come. Mortgage his brain, his brawn, and every pulse of his heart in order to pay the debt, to buy the material to slaughter the men of our country. And that is not all, the greatest crime of war is the crime against the unborn. Read what they are doing. They are calling out every man, every young man, and every virile man from seventeen to forty-five or fifty years old; they are calling them out. All the splendid scientific force and energy of the splendid virile manhood are being called out to be food for the cannon, and they are leaving behind the degenerate, defective imbecile, the unfit, the criminals, the diseased to be the fathers of children yet to be born.

The only way to have a volunteer army is to draft them.

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!

We had the Vietnam War in the '60s, and there was a draft. The students didn't believe in it, and it unified them.

I was a surf bum wannabe. I left home at age 17 and moved to Southern California to try to take up surfing as a vocation, but this was in 1964, and there was this nasty little thing called the Vietnam War. As a result, I got drafted.

It's possible that in the future, women could be drafted not only into the military... but actually drafted into combat. I'm very uncomfortable with that.

An army which cannot be regularly recruited is a doomed army.

I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

In 1793 such a force as no one had any conception of made its appearance. War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State... By this participation of the people in the war... a whole Nation with its natural weight came into the scale.

Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources.

I believe that if the entire voting population of the United States could be taken in small groups on a personally conducted tour of even the neutral countries of Europe, 85 percent of them would vote next November for any presidential candidate of any party who could convincingly promise them a big navy and conscription.

At public ceremonies, moreover, mothers whose sons were conscripted for the business of fighting were lined up and “invited” to kiss the cannon already used or to be used in the execution of Italy’s imperial program in Ethiopia.

I succeeded in staying out of the military during the Vietnam War, and I would never assume the right to tell others to do a “duty” that I shirked.

I think a draft produces a better Army than the one we would have with all volunteers, because I think you get average Americans if you have a draft. And if it's an all-volunteer Army, you get people who join up because of some problem in their own lives. They don't have anything else to do, they don't have a job, or they can't find what they want to do, so they join the Army. And it doesn't produce the best Army.

When the citizens of a nation will no longer volunteer to defend it, then it is probably not worth saving. No nation has the right to survive with conscript troops, and in the long run, no nation ever has.

Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.

Long history of inept handling of men and inequitable distribution of the burden of military service should lead us to welcome and encourage moves to end the draft.

The French system of conscription brings together a fair sample of all classes; ours is composed of the scum of the earth - the mere scum of the earth. It is only wonderful that we should be able to make so much out of them afterwards.

I never had the chance to decide; I was drafted to serve my nation. While I received a deferment to attend school, I ultimately served in the United States Army in the years following the Korean conflict.