Draft Resistance Quotes

Resistance to conscription [in WWI] was quite strong. By the end of the war, the ranks of noncooperators were stunningly large. Roughly 3 million eligible men never registered, in violation of the law — compared with the 24 million who did. And some 338,000 who did register either failed to obey an induction notice or deserted after they joined the ranks .... Altogether, a higher percentage of American men successfully resisted conscription during World War I than during the Vietnam War half a century later.

The U.S. never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war.

The Vietnam War was happening, but Lubbock was... They put a pinch on it.

Majored in staying out of Vietnam.

As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.

I remember being in Washington for high school when the city was on fire and those were troubling times, the Vietnam War, the protests.

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television.

You dare not—at least I hope you dare not—attempt a conscription to fill the ranks of your regular army.

On the unofficial level it was a glorious moment in our national life because young people decided that this had to stop, that they could no longer stand the shedding of blood in this tragic adventure in Southeast Asia.

More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.

I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.

Lyndon Johnson WAS the Vietnam War. Without the paranoia of Johnson there would never have been a Vietnam.

Vietnam in America was truly a second Civil War.

I wasn't for Vietnam. When I told that to the hippie newspaper, all my people got nervous.

We had the Vietnam War in the '60s, and there was a draft. The students didn't believe in it, and it unified them.

We we’re wrong, terribly wrong [about the Vietnam war.]

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life - into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood.

During the Vietnam era, more than 30,000 draft dodgers and deserters sought harbor in cities like Montreal and Toronto, where public opposition to the war was strong and most residents didn't question their motives.

I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.

[On the Vietnam War:] I leave all morality up to you clergymen.

The Vietnam War was a tragedy waiting to happen, but one made much worse by countless errors along the way, in many of which I had a part.

I was arrested 1965. I had come back from the merchant marines, got into conversations about the war. I had never heard of Vietnam until I was in the merchant marines in constitution square in Athens, and I picked up the New York Herald or the International Herald Tribune and there was my first introduction of the word Vietnam.

I'm a child of the sixties, I'm a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution.

Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war.

I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement.