Forced Enlistment Quotes

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.

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

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

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

So the whole of war, when you look at it is probably run by professional soldiers, and the rest of them are just recruits, or people who are just forced to join the army.

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

Conscription may have been good for the country, but it damned near killed the country.

Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.

A universal draft is most often the instrument of Third World dictators.

This is the first step on the odious ground of conscription—a plan sir, which never will and never ought to be submitted to by this country while it retains one idea of civil freedom.

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.