Chen Shui-bian Quotes

At 18, they're old enough to drive. The girls enter university, and the boys enter into National Service. Since they have a duty to defend our country, these 18-year-olds should also have the right to elect their leaders. They are mature enough.

I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there.

I'm not a believer in bringing back the draft. But I am a huge proponent of national service.

Sixteen- and 17-year-olds pay taxes and can join the army, so surely they should in turn be given their right to vote.

If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.

Pennsylvania is soon to participate in a profoundly solemn and historic departure from precedent when, for the first time in our Republic, there will be registration for peace-time conscription on Wednesday, October 16th, between the hours of 7 A. M. and 9 P. M. This date, designated as Registration Day by authority of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, and set by the President's Proclamation… is one of the most significant days in the annals of our Commonwealth and our Nation. All male persons in the United States, with the few exceptions which already have been made clear, who have attained the twenty-first anniversary of the day of their birth and who have not attained the thirty-sixth anniversary of the day of their birth, are required to present themselves and submit to registration for compulsory military service. Never before has America, through the Congress of the United States, found it necessary to take such a step. The impact and consequences of Registration Day make it an historic event to all of our people. Every family is affected. All means available must be used to apprise everyone everywhere of what must be done to complete the registration properly, accurately and fully.

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.

In the war, most young men were inducted into the armed forces at the age of 17. A group of students was permitted to attend university before taking part in wartime research projects.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.

We may need to change the way we think. As in Israel, I think there should be a mandatory draft, where you go away for the service of your country for three years.

Simply, I believe the United States should lower the voting age to 17.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

But although Australia was also involved in the Vietnam conflict, I can remember my dad telling us that if we were in Australia, we wouldn't be drafted until we were 20.

Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.

I was honestly willing to accept compulsory military service, provided that the voluntary system had first been tried out, and had failed to supply the men needed and who could still be spared from industry, and were numerically worth troubling about.

If your sons must be torn from you by conscription, consign them to the care of God; but let there be no volunteers except for defensive war.

The bottom line is that we have a more representative sample of middle America in the volunteer force in 1990 than can be achieved in any draft.

Manhood suffrage means manhood obligation for service in peace and war

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.

When you turn 18 in the United States, you should be automatically registered to vote. Ideally, this sensible reform would be a federal law affecting all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and American territories, but our federal government stopped being sensible a very long time ago.

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.

I should not care to live half-frozen in a trench, up to my middle in water, for three or four months, because someone in authority said I ought to shoot Germans. But if I were a Frenchman I should do it, because I would have been accustomed to the idea by my compulsory military service.

There can be no army without men. Men can be had voluntarily or involuntarily. We have ceased to obtain them voluntarily: and to obtain them involuntarily, is the draft—the conscription.

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