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Conscription Quotes

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Conscription Quotes

“It doesn't take an army to change the world, or an average-sized militia group, either. All it takes is one individual to say the word "No". Be it a man refusing to register for the draft, or be it a gun owner refusing to register his weapons in Connecticut, it is the same: defiance in the face of arbitrary authority.”

IndividualityGun ControlRefusalDefianceChange The WorldAuthoritarianismPower Of ThoughtsGun RightsConscriptionDraftRefusing To SettleRefusal To Answer The Call
Author:Mike Klepper
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“I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world. Compulsory schooling is essentially a means of curtailing natural strength and exploiting people. The same is true of military conscription, which developed within the same context. The anarch rejects both of them - just like obligatory vaccination and insurance of all kinds. He has reservations when swearing an oath. He is not a deserter, but a conscientious objector.”

FreedomEducationInsuranceConscriptionAnarch
Book:Eumeswil
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“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”

WarDeathReligionCausesChristianityPrinciplesSacrificeChildhoodFriendsSuicideTorturePatriotismUglinessFanaticismNovemberSoldiersMartyrdomBoyhoodPoppiesTheocracyMasochismOrwellConscriptionSelf ImportanceMartyrsComradesMemorialsKamikazeSuicide AttackSelf AbnegationChristian Martyrs
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“In 1870, came the victory of the short-service troops of Prussia over the long-service troops of France, where conscription had but recently been reintroduced in a partial form and as a supplementary measure. That obvious contrast carried more weight into the world than all the other factors which tilted the scales against France. As a result, universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rulp of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare—which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.”

DemocracyTyrannyWarfareUnlimitedTotalitarianismConscriptionLimitedTotal
Book:The Revolution in Warfare.
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“Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare —which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.”

WarDemocracyUniversalTyrannyNationalismUnlimitedTotalitarianismConscriptionLimitedTotal
Author:Liddell Hart
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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.”

MenHas BeensStatesWisdomAbleLawPoliticsNationsLinesEconomyCitizensDrinkAuthorityWorshipMarkCastsProfessionDestroyedVarietyLiberalismIronGatesInstructionTolerateSubmissionExaminationCompulsoryFood And DrinkConscription
Author:Hilaire Belloc
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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.”

WarBodyIssuesMilitaryTrainingUniversalSlaveryPreparationOpponentsSegregationParts Of The BodyConscriptionMilitary Training
Book:Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator's power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”

YearsHas BeensDoneNationsDemocracyRightsSpeechSixLaborDifficultyBillsPressesCommandInternalsConcentrationCampsDictatorFreedom Of SpeechWiserScratchesBill Of RightsFreedom Of The PressPreparednessConcentration CampConscription
Book:The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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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.”

HumansStatesSocialResultsEnvironmentDirectIntelligentResponseAffairHarmPlanningPsychologicalJailAnarchyBehaviourDefiniteGroundedHypothesisCompulsionAnarchismTop DownConscriptionSocial Environment
Book:Like a conquered province: the moral ambiguity of America
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“Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.”

PeopleMenMayShowsGovernmentAmericaPurposeMilitaryDutyValuableRidiculousSurrenderContradictionNonsenseAmbitiousShow MeFree GovernmentMischievousConscription
Author:Daniel Webster
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“I would agree that much with people who accept private property - that conscription is an unpardonable transgression, whether it be "corrupt" or not. The Spanish anarchists opposed conscription during the civil war in Spain as a gross expropriation of property, the most precious property that we have, our own physical beings themselves.”

PeopleWarAcceptingAgreePropertyCivil WarSpainGrossAnarchistPrivate PropertyTransgressionConscriptionDuring The Civil War
Author:Murray Bookchin
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“I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!”

PeopleIfsThinkingYearsCountryMatterStatesNamesNationsUnitedPayUnited StatesTwentiesNo Matter WhatSlaveryVolunteerDrainsShamefulConscriptionVolunteer Service
Author:Robert A. Heinlein
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“The principle of compulsory service, embodied in the system of conscription, lias been the means by which modem dictators and military gangs have shackled their people after a coup d'état, and bound them to their own aggressive purposes. In view of the great service that conscription has rendered to tyranny and war, it is fundamentally shortsighted for any liberty-loving and peace-desiring peoples to maintain it as an imagined safeguard, lest they become the victims of the monster they have helped to preserve.”

PeopleMeanWarPurposeViewsLibertyPrinciplesMilitaryVictimBoundsMonstersTyrannyPreservesAggressiveDictatorGangCompulsoryCoupsGreat ServiceConscription
Author:B. H. Liddell Hart
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“Wicksell's old-fashioned liberalism is reminiscent of John Maynard Keynes' attitude toward conscription during World War I. Keynes opposed conscription, but he was not a pacifist. He opposed conscription because it deprived the citizen of the right to decide for himself whether or not to join in the fight. Keynes was exempt as a civil servant from conscription; so there is no need to question his sincerity. Apparently his belief in the rights of the individual against a majority of his compatriots was very strong indeed.”

WorldNeedsWarFightingIndividualBeliefStrongAttitudeRightsCitizensMajorityServantWar Of The WorldsLiberalismSincerityVery StrongWorld War IOld FashionedDeprivedPacifistKeynesCivil ServantsConscription
Book:THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
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