War & Peace Quote by Thomas Paine

Paine’s genius here is scale-shifting: he drags the reader’s attention away from the map and onto the moral horizon. “Not a field of a few acres of ground” is a deliberate demotion of the tactical, the small-bore obsession with who holds which patch of earth. In its place he installs “a cause” - a word that turns messy rebellion into a coherent story, something that can survive setbacks without collapsing into mere disorder.

The line is also an insurance policy against despair. Paine knew revolutions don’t fail only from bullets; they fail when people decide a loss is a verdict. By insisting that victory can come “in one battle, or by degrees,” he reframes time as an ally. Gradualism isn’t compromise here; it’s stamina. That phrasing gives permission for a long war without making the public feel like the leaders are lowering expectations. It’s a rhetorical way of saying: stop treating the next engagement as the final exam.

The subtext carries a quiet threat, too. If the “cause” is what matters, then the struggle becomes existential: you can’t bargain your way out of it with a land deal, and you can’t measure success with a single triumph. Paine wrote as the American Revolution wobbled between hope and panic, when morale was as strategic as ammunition. This sentence is propaganda in the best sense: not a lie, but a reordering of priorities, designed to make persistence feel not just possible, but inevitable.