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illiterate.
Socrates was far more sophisticated, as cultured as you can imagine. The temptation must have been there to proclaim himself a god, and by that proclamation he may have been worshiped and not poisoned. The same people who killed him would have worshiped him; they would have made churches, and they would have still been worshiping him.
It needs immense courage when you have such consciousness, such clarity, to remain humble and just human -- knowing perfectly well that this is the way to death. Sooner or later these same people are going to kill you, these people whom you are trying to make free from all fetters. Still Socrates chose to remain human. That's why you don't see any religion after Socrates, no church, no theology, no holy scripture.
But the man did a great service: he made it clear that your prophets and your messiahs are pretenders. And you are such that you get into the traps of pretenders very easily, because they strengthen your conditioning; they help you to remain in your prison. And they call your prison by good names, so you are happy.
With a man like Socrates you are not happy because he says exactly what the situation is -- that you are a prisoner, and you have to come out of it.
People are lazy; people want not to change.
People simply want consolations.
Somebody should come as if he is from somewhere higher, coming from God himself to tell them, "You are perfectly right -- just go on believing in God. Go on praying to God every night for two minutes, and everything is perfectly okay with you." This you enjoy, because it saves you all the trouble of change.
People like Socrates seem to be very dangerous because they go on hitting hard on your consolations: they take away all your conditionings, they expose you to your reality. Their work is surgical. It hurts, it is painful, but that is the way a new man can be born.
What Socrates was doing twenty-five centuries ago, I am doing now.
Twenty-five centuries have gone by without any change as far as humanity is concerned. Three times they have tried to kill me... three attempts on my life. In every possible way the
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