Themes

"We all can't be heroes, for someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by."

"Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is."

"There are heroes in evil as well as in good."

"My personal attendant does not think so much of these things as I do."

"The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base."

"Even as a kid, it wasn’t to big stories of heroism that I listened but to the everyday people on my block more than anything else. Since I thought of my father and mother as somewhat heroic in their early years, what interested me tremendously was how this whole other world of people living every day, how they lived their lives. I think most people are heroic to a degree, they’re heroic in caring for the lives of the people around them and not dumping each other or dumping on each other."

"Tel a esté miraculeux au monde, auquel sa femme et son valet n'ont rien veu seulement de remarquable; peu d'hommes ont esté admirez par leur domestiques."

"People would be amazed at the behind-the-scenes activity in hero-making; quarrels over which cases are most deserving; seeing that all ranks and units are properly represented; dressing up weak cases to make them appear stronger; last minute switches from one class of decoration to another. … The number of decorations is determined, not by the number of deserving cases, but by the number and types of medals the admiral totes along."

"Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism."

"'Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of a legendary virtue carved upon our father's graves."

"Dost thou know what a hero is? Why, a hero is as much as one should say,—a hero."

"A real hero saves everyone."

"You see all these white heroes, everybody is white, all the literature classes—your Shakespeare, your poetry — everybody’s white, and you start to feel less than."

"If everyone in your class has heroes and they can relate to them in textbooks and literature, and then you don't see any of your heritage there, you feel less than. And I always wanted to be able to make Latin kids like myself feel more than."

"There is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal for a hero. He never has time to sit on it. One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from under him, and using it to batter a world with."

"Crowds speak in heroes."

"Another definition of a hero is someone who is concerned about other people's well-being, and will go out of his or her way to help them -- even if there is no chance of a reward. That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 für den Kammerdiener keinen Helden."

"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."

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

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

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

"Self-trust is the essence of heroism."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The hero is the world-man, in whose heart One passion stands for all, the most indulged."

"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost."