Listen, little man
In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had.
You are "free" in only one respect: free from the self-criticism that might help you to govern your own life.
I've never heard you complain: "You exalt me as the future master of myself and my world. But you don't tell me how a man becomes a master of himself, and you don't tell me what's wrong with me, what's wrong with what I think and do."
"In order to progress from the status of faithful slave to a single master and become an indiscriminate slave, you must first kill the individual oppressor, the tsar for instance. You cannot commit such a political murder without revolutionary motives and a lofty ideal of freedom."
"Have you ever noticed how ridiculous the common people are made to look in the movies?"
"You are not always small, little man. I know you have your "great moments," your "flights of enthusiasm" and "exaltation." But you lack the perserverance to let your enthusiasm soar, to let your exaltation carry you higher and higher. "
"I tell you, little man, you've lost all feeling for the best that is in you. You've stifled it. And when you find something worthwhile in others, in your children, your wife, your husband, your father or mother, you kill it. Little man, you're small and you want to stay small."
"You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you, even if it costs you your backbone or wrecks your whole life. Since you have never learned to seize upon happiness, to enjoy it and safeguard it, you lack the courage and integrity. Shall I tell you, little man, what kind of man you are? "
"Who am I to have an opinion of my own?" If once you knew that you do count for something, that you do have a sound opinion of your own, that your field and factory are meant to provide for life and not for death, then, little man, you yourself would be able to answer the question you've just asked. You wouldn't need any diplomats.
"That's all very well and good. But now they've made these atom bombs. A single one of them can kill hundreds of thousands of people!" Use your head, little man! Do you think Prince Blowhard makes atom bombs? No, they're made by little man who shout hurrah, hurrah instead of refusing to make them. You see, little man, it all boils down to one thing, to you and your sound or unsound thinking. And you, the most brilliant scientist of the twentieth century, if you were not a microscopically little man, you'd have thought in terms of the world and not of any nation. Your great intellect would have shown you how to keep the atom bomb out of the world; or if the logic of scientific development made such an invention inevitable, you'd have brought all your influence to bear to prevent it from being used.
You are "free" in only one respect: free from the self-criticism that might help you to govern your own life.
I've never heard you complain: "You exalt me as the future master of myself and my world. But you don't tell me how a man becomes a master of himself, and you don't tell me what's wrong with me, what's wrong with what I think and do."
You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion; when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life--you have it in you, little man, somewhere deep down in a corner of your being; when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings; when you've learned to recognize two things in their season: your gifts and the onset of old age; when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors: when you cease to set more store by a marriage certificate than by love between man and woman; when you learn to recognize your errors promptly and not too late, as you do today; when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats; when instead of enraging you as it does today, your adolescents daughter's happiness in love makes your heart swell with joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory of the days when small children were punished for touching their sex organs; when the human faces you see on the street are no longer drawn with grief and misery but glow with freedom, vitality, and serenity; when human bodies cease to walk this earth with rigid, retracted pelvises and frozen sex organs.
You are great, little man, when you're not mean and small. Your greatness, little man, is the only hope we have left. You're great when you attend lovingly to your trade, when you take pleasure in carving and building and painting, in sowing and reaping, in the blue sky and the deer and the morning dew, in music and dancing, in your growing children, and in the beautiful body of your wife or husband; when you go to the planetarium to study the stars, to the library to read what other men and women have thought about life. You're great when your grandchild sits on your lap and you tell him of times long past and look into the uncertain future with his sweet, childlike curiosity. You're great, mother, when you lull your baby to sleep; when with tears in your eyes you pray fervently for his future happiness; and when hour after hour, year after year, you build this happiness in your child.