I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching. — Roger Nash Baldwin
A "just war" - if there could be such a thing - would not require conscription. Volunteers would be plentiful. — Ben Salmon
Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service. — Leon Trotsky
National defense is the sacred duty of the young and all other people. — Kim Jong Il
The preservation of freedom, is not the task of soldiers alone. The whole nation has to be strong. — Lal Bahadur Shastri
I've got no respect for any young man who won't join the colors. — Nathan Bedford Forrest
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. — Manfred von Richthofen
Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war. — Smedley Butler
Our army is composed of the scum of the earth - the mere scum of the earth. — Duke of Wellington
The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. — Oliver Cromwell
The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance. — Stanley Milgram
England expects that every man will do his duty. — Horatio Nelson
Short Conscription Quotes
...to make the world safe for democracy. — Woodrow Wilson
Conscription may have been good for the country, but it damn near killed the army. — Sir Richard Hull
They may not be conscripted against their will as the foot soldiers in a federal crusade. — John Paul Stevens
They talk about conscription as a democratic institution. Yes; so is a cemetary. — Meyer London
Conscription Image Quotes
Military Conscription Quotes
I have made no secret, either privately or publicly, of any sense of outrage over officially enforced military and war service. I regard it as a duty of conscience to fight against such barbarous enslavement of the individual with every means available. — Albert Einstein
A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men. — Daniel Webster
I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war. — Bayard Rustin
[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you're going to have a police State. — Murray Bookchin
Realistically speaking, Ayn Rand should not have opposed the antidraft movement and supported the Vietnam War effort - in effect, she supported military conscription. — Murray Bookchin
I was conscripted to military service, and my gut feeling was to refuse to serve. I did not want to kill other people. This seemed to me wrong, if not in principle, so at least in practice. — Torbjorn Tannsjo
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. — Ron Paul
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! — Robert A. Heinlein
Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions. — Phillip Noyce
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. — Alexis de Tocqueville
With respect to where we are now, we have a voluntary army. And if we ever go back to conscription I hope that at time it will be the kind of conscription that was put in at the end of the Vietnam War. And that is, everybody is equally liable to be called to serve the nation in time of conflict. — Colin Powell
All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution. — Noam Chomsky
All these fifty-year-old guys wearing baseball caps and shorts and acting like children. It winds me up. Men don't have to take responsibility anymore. Most of the guys I know would punch me on the nose for saying this, but maybe we do have to bring back conscription. — Chrissie Hynde
The weeping voices rise straight up and strike the clouds. A passer-by at the roadside asks a conscript why, The conscript answers only that drafting happens often. — Du Fu
Conscription is an impediment to achieving the forces Australia needs. It is an alibi for failing to give proper conditions to regular soldiers. We will abolish conscription forthwith. By abolishing it, Australia will achieve a better army, a better-paid army - and a better, united society. — Gough Whitlam
What higher property do you have than your own person? I totally agree, by the way, with John Locke's idea that one's body is literally the most precious property that exists. I would say that conscription is the most heinous violation of property that one can imagine. — Murray Bookchin
Men will work hard for money. They will work harder for other men. But men will work hardest of all when they are dedicated to a cause. Until willingness overflows obligation, men fight as conscripts rather than following the flag as patriots. Duty is never worthily performed until it is performed by one who would gladly do more if only he could. — Harry Emerson Fosdick
True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force-necessity. — Emma Goldman
I would agree that much with people who accept private property - that conscription is an unpardonable transgression, whether it be "corrupt" or not. The Spanish anarchists opposed conscription during the civil war in Spain as a gross expropriation of property, the most precious property that we have, our own physical beings themselves. — Murray Bookchin
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. — Duke of Wellington
Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed. — Bayard Rustin
I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss. — Edward Hirsch
But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer. — Adam Johnson
Every possible effort should be made to stop recruiting for the Armed Forces. This may, and probably would, lead to some form of conscription being proposed or introduced. Thus would be provided a most favourable political platform upon which to fight the National Government. — Stafford Cripps
Our leisure is the time the Devil seizes upon to make us work for him; and the only way we can avoid conscription into his ranks is to keep all our leisure moments profitably employed. — James Ellis
I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit. — Gunter Grass
The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted. — Laurence Housman
The 50,000 Korean mercenaries we had in Vietnam were professional killers and just massacred people outright. And the American army did plenty of that too, but it couldn't take it after awhile. It's not the kind of job you can give to conscripts who are not trained to be murderers. — Noam Chomsky
For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged. — Jean-Paul Sartre
I would be literally patrician in the sense that the senators in ancient Rome were called conscript fathers, paters, from which comes the word patrician. So if you come from a senatorial family, you are literally patrician in that sense, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't be Billy Carter, you know, of recent memory. — Gore Vidal
We don't like to talk about that in America, but there are classes in America. And she [Julia Child] was of a class of women who were wealthy, privately educated, went to Smith, moved in that sort of circle. She was conscripted into the OSS, which is the early CIA, which was all filled with Yalies and Princeton and Harvard people and a few women who were typing mostly but also had something to do. — Meryl Streep
The woman is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not wholly her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends. Thus, abortion restrictions 'reduce pregnant women to no more than fetal containers.' — Dawn Johnsen
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. — Robert A. Heinlein
Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men. — Daniel Webster
Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states. — Paul Goodman
The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter. — Emma Goldman
We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator's power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
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