Heroes

"A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know the world hadn't ended."

"They died to save their country and they only saved the world."

"They were no iron men, but they were heroes. Seamen and clothing workers, clerks and artists, students and fathers of families. The phrase you heard so many times- 'united in a common cause'- it meant everything, and it meant nothing. For you could not hold an abstract idea in your mind at the front. You became aware at moments that the idea had never disappeared; that it was behind everything you did, behind the necessity you felt to do the job and do it well. It was something you did not talk about; it was something you took for granted."

"Though nothing, nothing will keep us together We can beat them, forever and ever Oh, we can be heroes just for one day."

"Andrea: Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero. Galileo: No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero."

"I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one."

"If everyone's a hero, then the word doesn't mean much anymore. And sooner or later we'll have to give the real heroes (the heroic ones) a new name, to distinguish them from the rest of the pack. Too bad "superheroes" is already taken."

"Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man."

"If Hero mean sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?"

"Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among Mankind."

"Nature seldom makes a hero and Fortune does not always proclaim those that she makes."

"He's of stature somewhat low— Your hero always should be tall, you know."

"What has suddenly happened is that the white race has lost its heroes. Worse, its heroes have been revealed as villains and its greatest heroes as the arch-villains. The new generations of whites, appalled by the sanguine and despicable record carved over the face of the globe by their race in the last five hundred years, are rejecting the panoply of white heroes, whose heroism consisted in erecting the inglorious edifice of colonialism and imperialism; heroes whose careers rested on a system of foreign and domestic exploitation, rooted in the myth of white supremacy and the manifest destiny of the white race."

"If you ask me, the difference between a hero and a coward is that a hero find some damn-fool way to con himself into going ahead instead of doing the sensible thing."

"A hero is an average person who has done something extraordinary."

"[Jews needed] a hero who could protect us against an almost invincible force. So [Siegel and Shuster] created an invincible hero."

"The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails."

"Self-trust is the essence of heroism."

"Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value."

"The heroes, the wise men, like the new moon have their waxing and waning."

"The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful."

"The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is 'heroism'. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities."

"The real heroes, and heroines, are those who deal heroically with the everyday cares of life, though God knows they’ve been multiplied enormously. It’s not the guy who kills a dragon once in his lifetime and then retires that’s a hero. It's the guy who kills cockroaches and rats every day, day after day, and doesn't rest on his laurels until he’s an old man, if then."

"Es gibt für den Kammerdiener keinen Helden."

"It hath been an antient custom among them [Hungarians] that none should wear a fether but he who had killed a Turk, to whom onlie yt was lawful to shew the number of his slaine enemys by the number of fethers in his cappe."

"Es gibt keinen Helden für den Kammerdiener; nicht aber weil jener nicht ein Held, sondern weil dieser – der Kammerdiener ist, mit welchem jener nicht als Held, sondern als Essender, Trinkender, sich Kleidender, überhaupt in der Einzelnheit des Bedürfnisses und der Vorstellung zu tun hat. So gibt es für das Beurteilen keine Handlung, in welcher es nicht die Seite der Einzelnheit der Individualität der allgemeinen Seite der Handlung entgegensetzen, und gegen den Handelnden den Kammerdiener der Moralität machen könnte."

"Heroes as great have died, and yet shall fall."

"Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona Multi: sed omnes illacrimabiles Urgentur, ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro."

"The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of to-morrow."

"Someone can conquer kingdoms and countries without being a hero; someone else can prove himself a hero by controlling his temper. Someone can display courage by doing the out-of-the-ordinary, another by doing the ordinary. The question is always-how does he do it?"

"It could be argued that normal life is after all nothing but a chain of clever compromises. The man who understands how to live well, the Lebenskünstler as the Germans call him, is nothing but a virtuoso in compromises. The hero and the saint, on the other hand, are "clumsy," quixotic, and maladroit. They have nothing of the Lebenskünstler and cannot help inflicting upon themselves wound after wound. The virtuoso of life, no less than the bonvivant, is a thoroughly feminine as well as effeminate product."

"Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh — that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage."