Wealth & Money Quote by Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu needles a comforting lie: that sacrifice is somehow voluntary, even virtuous in its deprivation. The line is built as a double negative, a kind of rhetorical trap. By insisting it is not taste, not preference, not temperament that keeps soldiers poor and short-lived, he strips away the romance of the warrior and replaces it with logistics and power. Soldiers don t avoid wealth because they re noble. They lack it because someone else controls the distribution. Soldiers don t die young because they re thrill-seekers. They die young because leaders spend lives the way they spend supplies.

The intent is coldly managerial. In The Art of War, morale and cohesion aren t mystical; they are engineered. This passage speaks to incentives: people will endure hardship when they see a path to reward and a reasonable expectation of survival. If they don t, they mutiny, desert, or simply stop fighting with conviction. Sun Tzu is reminding commanders that the rank-and-file are not abstractions. They are rational actors with basic appetites, and pretending otherwise is a strategic error.

The subtext lands hardest on leadership. If your army is underpaid or wasting away, don t blame the troops character. Blame the system you designed: the campaign length, the supply chain, the corruption, the casualness about casualties. It is an early, unsparing critique of the way states launder their choices through the bodies of soldiers and then call the outcome honor.