Time & Perspective Quote by George C. Marshall

Marshall is admitting something most war leaders prefer to keep off the record: the moral danger isn’t panic, it’s acclimation. “You get hardened to these things” is a soldier’s plainspoken diagnosis of how bureaucracy and command can anesthetize conscience. The line lands because it refuses the comforting fiction that leaders naturally carry every death with them. Marshall says the opposite: if you don’t force yourself to look, you will drift into treating casualties as just another column of figures.

The specific intent is managerial and moral at once. By “send[ing] Mr. Roosevelt every few days a statement,” Marshall isn’t just reporting upward; he’s designing a ritual of accountability. He wants the President to feel the steady cost of decisions in real time, not as a retrospective lament or a victory surcharge. It’s an attempt to keep strategic choices tethered to human consequence, to prevent the White House from living only in maps, production quotas, and optimistic communiques.

The subtext is also political. In World War II, Roosevelt was the nation’s chief persuader, balancing coalition warfare, public morale, and massive mobilization. Marshall, as Army Chief of Staff, had to prosecute an industrial-scale war without letting its scale dissolve responsibility. His solution is starkly modern: data as a moral instrument, not merely an operational one.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to romanticize sacrifice. It frames empathy as something you have to practice deliberately, like marksmanship or logistics, because power’s default setting is forgetting.