Life & Wisdom Quote by Tom Paulin

A poet saying this lands like a lit match in a library: not because the words are complicated, but because they’re brazenly unembarrassed about what polite language usually hides. “I think” feigns modesty, as if this is a casual observation rather than a moral grenade. The phrase “in fact” does even more damage: it implies the speaker is correcting naïve sentimentality with hard, adult realism. That small rhetorical move tries to launder a violent claim into the tone of a policy memo.

The intent reads less like a literal operational endorsement than a provocation aimed at the listener’s comfort. Paulin, long associated with pugnacious political commentary around Northern Ireland and British state power, has a record of testing the boundary between describing political violence and appearing to justify it. Here, the subtext is tribal and strategic: civilians aren’t framed as people but as a psychological instrument, collateral converted into messaging. “Boost morale” is chillingly managerial, borrowing the language of workplaces and sports to talk about terror. That mismatch is the point; it exposes how euphemism can make atrocity sound like tactics.

Context matters because the line echoes a long, ugly logic in insurgency and counterinsurgency alike: violence against noncombatants as leverage, spectacle, or retaliation. Coming from a poet, it also implicates art’s own temptations - the thrill of moral transgression, the performance of radical candor, the idea that scandal equals honesty. The quote works because it forces a question the speaker may be trying to dodge: is this critique of violent realism, or a flirtation with it?