What I believe (E.M. Forster): excerpt about great men

... In search of a refuge, we may perhaps turn to hero-worship.
But here we shall get no help, in my opinion. Hero-worship is a
dangerous vice, and one of the minor merits of a democracy is
that it does not encourage it, or produce that unmanageable type
of citizen known as the Great Man. It produces instead different
kinds of small men - a much finer achievement. But people who
cannot get interested in the variety of life, and cannot make up
their own minds, get discontented over this, and they long for a
hero to bow down before and to follow blindly. It is significant
that a hero is an integral part of the authoritarian stock-in-trade
today. An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes
stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to
be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable. One hero at the
top and a smaller one each side of him is a favourite arrangement,
and the timid and the bored are comforted by the trinity, and,
bowing down, feel exalted and strengthened.

No, I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity
around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a
little man's pleasure when they come a cropper. Every now and
then one reads in the newspapers some such statement as: "The
coup d'etat appears to have failed, and Admiral Toma's where-
abouts is at present unknown." Admiral Toma had probably
every qualification for being a Great Man - an iron will, personal
magnetism, dash, flair, sexlessness - but fate was against him, so
he retires to unknown whereabouts instead of parading history
with his peers. He fails with a completeness which no artist and
no lover can experience, because with them the process of crea-
tion is itself an achievement, whereas with him the only possible
achievement is success.