Education Quote by Thomas Paine

Paine needles war where it hurts a young republic most: its pocketbook and its pretensions of control. The line opens with a warning about the fog of war, but it’s not the noble, tragic fog later romantics would celebrate. It’s bureaucratic chaos - a “train” of contingencies so long and jarring that even “human wisdom” (a sly jab at statesmen who sell wars as manageable) can’t price out the finale. The diction matters: “progress” is poisonously ironic, implying that what governments call forward motion is really an accelerating loss of agency.

Then Paine snaps the argument shut with a single certainty: taxes. That pivot is the quote’s engine. He reduces the grand rhetoric of honor and security to an unglamorous mechanism of state expansion. War, in Paine’s view, isn’t just violence abroad; it’s a domestic transformation that reliably concentrates power and normalizes extraction. The subtext is almost accusatory: leaders may not be able to predict the battlefield, but they can predict - and will gladly exploit - the fiscal consequences.

Context sharpens the bite. Paine writes as a revolutionary pamphleteer turned critic of overreach, steeped in the lived experience of conflict that began as liberation and risked curdling into permanent militarization. For readers who remember British taxation as a spark for revolt, “increase taxes” lands like a historical boomerang: war threatens to re-create the very conditions revolution claimed to abolish. It’s a debunker’s sentence, built to puncture martial certainty and force the public to follow the money.