Trevor Rabin Quotes

I've never been a soldier. In Denmark, at 18, as a male, you go in a draw, and if they pick you, you go and serve for a year. I didn't.

When I was 18, I went into the army as a payroll clerk because otherwise I was headed for Korea.

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

A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.

The average bright young man who is drafted hates the whole business because an army always tries to eliminate the individual differences in men.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

Each man ... shall serve for a training and service period of 12 consecutive months unless sooner discharged, except that whenever the Congress has declared that the national interest is imperiled, such 12-month period may be extended by the President to such time as may be necessary in the interests of national defense.

Conscription is the cemetery where every vestige of your liberty is to be buried.

The government has the right to the military service of all its able-bodied citizens.

Congress have a right by the Constitution to raise regular armies, and no restraint is imposed on the exercise of it …. It would be absurd to suppose that Congress could not carry this power into effect otherwise than be accepting the voluntary service of individuals.

... we might better reexamine the reasons for entering the war than abolish volunteers and substitute for them men dragged into the ranks by draft.

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.

The draft is the largest educational institutional in the world.

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.

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.

Nobody wants to go to war, but the burden of service cannot fall only on volunteers who, are attracted to the military for financial reasons.

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.

Manhood suffrage means manhood obligation for service in peace and war

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

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.

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.

The draft should be called slavery, involuntary servitude.

Universal military training is the only truly democratic solution to the problem of [military] preparedness.

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?