Conscription Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  Memorable, Army, Australia

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• [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

  Military, Support, Police

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• 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

  Devil, Way, Leisure

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• The worship of the nation has been able to make men tolerate under its authority what they could never have tolerated from princes: a submission to rule, which, through sumptuary laws on food and drink, through conscription, through a cast-iron system of compulsory instruction for all on State ordered lines, and through a State examination at the gate of every profession, has almost killed the citizen's power to react upon that which controls him, and has almost destroyed that variety which is the mark of life.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Law

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• 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

  Military, War, Issues

  Bayard Rustin (2003). “Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Military, War, Effort

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

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• 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

  Intelligent, Jail, Top Down

  Paul Goodman (1967). “Like a conquered province: the moral ambiguity of America”

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