Draft In War Quotes & Sayings

The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers - one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times - both in war, and in peace. — Al Franken

What do you see to the south?" Tanis asked abruptly.
Raistilin glanced at him. "What do I ever see with these eyes of mine Half-Elf?" the mage whispered bitterly. "I see death, death and destruction. I see war." He gestured up above. "The constellations have not returned. The Queen of Darkness is not defeated."
"We may have not won the war," Tanis began, "but surely we have won a major battle
"
Raistlin coughed and shook his head sadly.
"Do you see no hope?"
"Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in the vain attempt to reach it."
"Are you saying we should just give up?" Tanis asked, irritably tossing the bark away.
"I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open," Raistin answered. Coughing he drew his robes more closely around him. — Margaret Weis

What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later. — Tim O'Brien

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs. — Arundhati Roy

The New York Times is reporting that back in the '60s, presidential candidate Howard Dean used a letter from a doctor about a back condition to keep himself out of the draft in Vietnam and then spent 10 months skiing. Well it sounds like he's done the impossible. He actually made Bill Clinton and George Bush look like war heroes. — Jay Leno

One of the problems we currently have is there hasn't been in the population any serious engagement with the ethics of war because we have an all-volunteer army. I would think the return to the draft would be an intervention that would require discussion that might be more helpful in terms of our ability to limit war. — Stanley Hauerwas

It was nearly impossible to keep anything a secret, especially from her
sisters, the youngest of whom - Hyacinth - could probably have won the war against Napoleon in half
the time if His Majesty had only thought to draft her into the espionage service. — Julia Quinn

No State government has the right to make war, raise armies, or conclude treaties of peace. These rights," he said, were "expressly conferred upon the Confederate Government." Far from the draft being unconstitutional, he felt that "the volunteering system . . . was extra-constitutional, if not unconstitutional. — Frank E. Vandiver

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon. — Julia Glass

Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians. — Marie Colvin

Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!" — P. J. O'Rourke

Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC's Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots. — Howard Zinn

Taking into consideration all your loveliness
why can't you burn your bootsoles and your
draft card? How can you sit there saying yes
to war? You'll be a pauper when you die, sore
boy. Dead, while I still live at our addresss.
Oh my brother, why do you keep making plans
when I am at seizures of hearts and hands?
Come dance the dance, the Papa-Mama dance;
bring costumes from the suitcase pasted Ille de France,
the S.S. Gripsholm. Papa's London Harness case
he took abroad and kept i our attic laced
with old leather straps for storage and his
scholar's robes, black licorice - that metamorphosis
with it's crimson blood.
The Papa and Mama Dance — Anne Sexton

I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me. — Dylan McDermott

The draft," he shouts, "is white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people. The draft must end: not tomorrow, not next week, but today. — Tavis Smiley

By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself. — Richard Dawkins

No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft. — Tom Robbins

Drop Pants, Not Bombs. Break Dance, Not Hearts. Draft Beer, Not People. Make LOVE, Not WAR. — Ashley Purdy

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam. — Michael Ignatieff

I had a very strong feeling about the Vietnam War, and I had a strong feeling about participating in it. The military draft was in place, I was summoned for a physical exam, and I was either going to be classified as fit for military service or make my objection to it. So I made my objection to it. — Harrison Ford

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. — Margaret Atwood

When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War. — Robert Jay Lifton

So, as much as it is about this continuing war, the reinstated draft, and their individual views, it's really sort of a deeply human tale, and a character study as well. — Elijah Wood

When I appeared before the draft board examiner during World War II, he asked me if I thought I could kill. "I don't know about strangers," I replied, "but friends, certainly." — Oscar Levant

The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families. — Bob Schieffer

The roads that lead young men to war are not political roads, or national and international roads, but individual roads. What propels young men to combat is not the draft. Those who are not destined for armed combat usually will not be drafted for armed combat. The pool of human resources is vast, and the number of riflemen is small. The person who wants to avoid the draft will avoid it. And, in Vietnam, as the war went on, the numbers who successfully avoided the draft increased. So who fights? The fools, the uneducated, the knaves? I was none of these - or so I maintain. But I fought. — James R. McDonough

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify. — Radhanath Swami

Every day, almost as many men are killed at work as were killed during the average day in Vietnam. For men, there are, in essence, three male-only drafts: the draft of men to all the wars; the draft of Everyman to unpaid bodyguard; the draft of men to all the hazardous jobs or 'death professions. — Warren Farrell

Can't you see,Jimmy?It's not a war about our freedom,it's a power struggle between rulers and bosses wanting more land,more power.The likes of you and me are just cannon fodder in their draft war.We should have nothing to do with it,let alone be supporting it! The only fight that concerns the working man is the one the trades unions are fighting against the bosses.That's the only struggle I'm bothered about and I don't give a toss if they're British bosses or German! — Janet MacLeod Trotter

AR 601-210 was necessary because conscientious objectors could not enlist as medical experiment volunteers when there was no active draft program, according to prior Army regulations. This meant that the supply of WHITECOAT volunteers was cut off at the end of the Vietnam War. — Colin A. Ross

I guess it was hard for him to look at the logic behind the draft lotteries, because that same logic had taken away his father. And, anyway, what's so logical about the day you were born deciding when you might die? That's just a cruel joke, as I see it. — A.S. King

I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen. We were registered with no draft board, we had taken no physical examinations. No one had ever tested us for hernia or color blindness. Trick knees and punctured eardrums were minor complaints and not yet disabilities which would separate a few from the fate of the rest. We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction. — John Knowles

With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military. — Tim O'Brien

[In response to atrocities against Armenians] the British government issued a joint memo with France and Russia on 24 May 1915. The first draft, proposed by Russia, contained the phrase "crimes against Christianity and civilization," but France and Britain feared this would offend their own colonial Muslim populations and succeeded in changing the phrase to "crimes against humanity." This paved the way for the concept to assume its place after the war as one of the most important categories in international law. — Taner Akcam

In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years. — Charlie Savage

I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio. — Tim O'Brien

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. — Wil S. Hylton

I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously. — Tim O'Brien