Conscription Quotes

• 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

  Men, Risk, Liberty

  "Conscription – The Terrible Price of War". www.antiwar.com. November 26, 2003.

  126 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Military, War, Mean

  Albert Einstein (2017). “Einstein on Peace”, p.189, Pickle Partners Publishing

  65 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conscription is the vitality of a nation, the purification of its morality, and the real foundations of all its habits

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Military, Real, Foundation

  52 Copy quote

• A "just war" - if there could be such a thing - would not require conscription. Volunteers would be plentiful.

  Ben Salmon

  War, Volunteer, Would Be

  "Open Letter to President Wilson". Book by Ben Salmon, October 14, 1919.

  50 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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!

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Country, Thinking, Years

  Guest of Honor Speech at the 29th World Science Fiction Convention, Seattle, Washington, 1961.

  62 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Christian, Teaching, Liberty

  44 Copy quote

• 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

  Military, Men, America

  40 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, People, Volunteer

  Honor Speech at the 29th World Science Fiction Convention, Seattle, Washington, 1961.

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.

  William Lyon Mackenzie King

  Ifs

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Rights, Years, Freedom Of Speech

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (1995). “The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt”, Gramercy

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution.

  Noam Chomsky

  Slavery, Association, Welfare

  Source: thefifthcolumnnews.com

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Ideas, Body, Way

  Interview with Jeff Riggenbach, reason.com. October 1979.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Military, War, Men

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Baseball, Children, Responsibility

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Army, Vietnam

  Source: www.foxnews.com

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Men, America, Law

  "Democracy in America". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville. Chapter XIII, 1835.

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Australia, Forever, Generations

  28 Copy quote

• The principle of compulsory service, embodied in the system of conscription, lias been the means by which modem dictators and military gangs have shackled their people after a coup d'état, and bound them to their own aggressive purposes. In view of the great service that conscription has rendered to tyranny and war, it is fundamentally shortsighted for any liberty-loving and peace-desiring peoples to maintain it as an imagined safeguard, lest they become the victims of the monster they have helped to preserve.

  B. H. Liddell Hart

  Military, War, Mean

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Believe, Degrees

  Bayard Rustin (2012). “I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters”, p.11, City Lights Publishers

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Army, Men, Force

  Emma Goldman, Candace Falk (2008). “Emma Goldman”, p.381, University of Illinois Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...to make the world safe for democracy.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Strong Women, Tyrants, Differences

  Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Stanley Link, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton University (1985). “Papers: Edited by Arthur S. Link and Others”

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wicksell's old-fashioned liberalism is reminiscent of John Maynard Keynes' attitude toward conscription during World War I. Keynes opposed conscription, but he was not a pacifist. He opposed conscription because it deprived the citizen of the right to decide for himself whether or not to join in the fight. Keynes was exempt as a civil servant from conscription; so there is no need to question his sincerity. Apparently his belief in the rights of the individual against a majority of his compatriots was very strong indeed.

  Mancur Olson

  Strong, Attitude, War

  Mancur OLSON (2009). “The Logic of Collective Action”, p.90, Harvard University Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  War, People, Spain

  Interview with Jeff Riggenbach, reason.com. October 1979.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Scum Of The Earth, Class, Together

  Speaking about soldiers in the British Army, November 04, 1813.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Fighting, Government, Effort

  "Your Alternative Government" by Talus, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, (p. 36), 1945.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source