Linda Colley

Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain's wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.

British Historian

Chrissie Hynde

All these fifty-year-old guys wearing baseball caps and shorts and acting like children. It winds me up. Men don't have to take responsibility anymore. Most of the guys I know would punch me on the nose for saying this, but maybe we do have to bring back conscription.

American Musician

Bayard Rustin

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.

American Leader

Ron Paul

Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.

American Politician

Phillip Noyce

Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.

Australian Director

Laurence Housman

The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted.

English Playwright

Chiang Kai-shek

Government acquisition of food supplies in time of war is no less important than conscription. Equity is the fundamental principle applicable to both these essential phases of war administration.

Chinese Soldier

Roger Nash Baldwin

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

American Activist

A. Philip Randolph

I personally pledge myself to openly counsel, aid, and abet youth, both black and white, to quarantine any Jim Crow conscription system.

William Lyon Mackenzie King

Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.

Canadian Politician

Conscription means you have to join without choice, often legally required by a government.

Mandatory Nature

The service is usually for a country's armed forces, but can also be for other government services.

National Service

Conscription has been common in wartime, but some countries have it during peace too.

Historical Context

 national military service which is our internal system of conscription you know that people are mixed as well and there was an image that a friend of mine wants to put forward to me where he said that after a certain number of weeks in the Sun everybody is brown right and then everybody and this color of the skin

New ways to understand...

 conscription men into the army and that of course created huge amounts of data and what that data showed was that in some places nine out of ten men were too sick to fight and it was that and the sort of indisputable reality that that