Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s line is a polite English shiv aimed at the cult of the hero. “Great Men” arrives in sneering capitals: not greatness as achievement, but as a social category with followers, myth-makers, and an excuse to stop thinking. His distrust isn’t moral squeamishness; it’s aesthetic and political. Greatness, in his telling, doesn’t simply lead, it flattens. The “desert of uniformity” is what happens when one towering personality becomes the weather system for everyone else’s imagination: institutions, art, even friendships start mirroring the leader’s taste. Individual difference dries out.

Then Forster pivots from dryness to gore. The “pool of blood” is the real invoice for charisma when it migrates into nationhood, empire, or war. He wrote through the high noon and aftermath of European imperial confidence, and lived to see mass politics turn “Great Men” into an industrial product. The sentence captures a liberal humanist’s nightmare: not just violence, but violence made tidy by a narrative of destiny.

The last clause is the wickedly honest one. “A little man’s pleasure” confesses envy and relief, a democratic schadenfreude that refuses to be shamed. When the titan “comes a cropper,” the spell breaks; the room’s oxygen returns. Forster isn’t pretending we can live without leaders. He’s insisting we stop romanticizing the personality that demands unanimity. The real heroism, implied, is small-scale: messy plurality, private decency, and a suspicion of anyone who makes the world too simple.