Selected heroism quotes

1. Geography was not furthered by the achievement, scientific progress was scarcely hastened, and nothing new was discovered. Yet the names of Hillary and Tenzing went instantly into all languages as the names of heroes, partly because they really were men of heroic mold but chiefly because they represented so compellingly the spirit of their time.

2. As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

3. As soon as someone is identified as an unsung hero, he no longer is.

4. Heroism is endurance for one moment more.

5. Zhukov was the most successful commander of World War II, who fell from grace under Khrushchev, but never lost his place in the pantheon of Soviet heroes.

6. A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.

7. That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

8. Superman! Champion of the oppressed. The physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need.

9. A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can't be a lasting thing. That's not saying that people shouldn't keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war.

10. Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.

11. Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.

12. Hi, I'm a hero, but I can't tell you why. It's classified.

13. In Dante the hero would rather flee and renounce the tempting embrace instead of yielding to his desires and enduring the attendant dangers.

14. A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

15. I saved a girl from being attacked last night. I controlled myself.

16. Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

17. I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them.

18. Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.

19. What is a hero without love for mankind?

20. Our Lord Jesus Christ, my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants.

21. It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison - it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo.

22. Boldness governed by superior intellect is the mark of a hero.

23. Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

24. Every hero becomes a bore at last.

25. Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?

26. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are - One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

27. Storm'd at with shot and shell, While horse and hero fell, They that had fought so well Came thro' the jaws of Death Back from the mouth of Hell, All that was left of them, Left of six hundred.

28. When the first Superman movie came out, I gave dozens of interviews to promote it. The most frequent question was: What is a hero? My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences. Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them.

29. When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.'

30. Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,-they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

31. The reason I don't worry about society is, nineteen people knocked down two buildings and killed thousands. Hundreds of people ran into those buildings to save them. I'll take those odds every fucking day.

32. The first thing I ever thought of when I thought of 'Buffy: The Movie' was the little...blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed, in every horror movie. The idea of 'Buffy' was to subvert that idea, that image, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim. That element of surprise...[and] genre-busting is very much at the heart of both the movie and the series.

33. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them.

34. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

35. The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

36. There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

37. 'I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields.The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone.It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully- and losing it- just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.'

38. 'We would make our heroes shallow,' he answered, the words very slow and almost sad. 'We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength.' (David Talbot)

39. All men do the best they can. But none meet life honestly and few heroically.

40. We can be heroes, for just one day.

41. The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be the heroic.

42. The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled. Twit.

43. As a nation, we are too young to have true mythic heroes, and we must press real human beings into service. Honest Abe Lincoln the legend is quite a different character from Abraham Lincoln the man. And so should they be. And so should both be treasured, as long as they are distinguished. In a complex and confusing world, the perfect clarity of sports provides a focus for legitimate, utterly unambiguous support [or] disdain. The Dodgers are evil, the Yankees good. They really are, and have been for as long as anyone in my family can remember.

44. Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of 'traditional values' and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon-which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form.

45. His Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not 'succeed by being an easy religion.' As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, - sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.

46. The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone In the ranks of death you will find him His father's sword he hath girded on And his wild harp slung behind him.

47. In being more than an exception, part, Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage.

48. Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

49. Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty.

50. Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.

51. Yet was Rob Roy as wise as brave; Forgive me if the phrase be strong;- A Poet worthy of Rob Roy Must scorn a timid song.

52. And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round. Let us then declare that King Arthur and his noble knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity and the theme of a world order, sustained by valour, physical strength, and good horses and armour, slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.

53. Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang.

54. I'm not really the heroic type. I was beat up by Quakers.

55. A famous man is Robin Hood, The English ballad-singer's joy! And Scotland has a thief as good, An outlaw of as daring mood; She has her brave Rob Roy!

56. And, far and near, through vale and hill, Are faces that attest the same; The proud heart flashing through the eyes, At sound of Rob Roy's name.

57. I mourn for Kurt. A once beautiful, then pathetic, lost and heroically stupid boy.

58. Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man, George Washington, father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led Americans out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood. Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with his eloquence. And then, beyond the Reflecting Pool, the dignified columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln. Beyond those monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery, with its row upon row of simple white markers bearing crosses of Stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom. Each one of those markers is a monument to the kind of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno, and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam. Under one such marker lies a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, 'My Pledge,' he had written these words: 'America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.' The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice that Martin Treptow and so many thousands of others were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that together with God's help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us. And after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans.

59. A True Red Blood American Hero

60. The greatest hero of Greece was Hercules. He was a personage of quite another order from the great hero of Athens, Theseus. He was what all Greece except Athens most admired. The Athenians were different from the other Greeks and their hero therefore was different. Theseus was, of course, bravest of the brave as all heroes are, but unlike other heroes he was as compassionate as he was brave and a man of great intellect as well as great bodily strength. It was natural that the Athenians should have such a hero because they valued thought and ideas as no other part of the country did. In Theseus their ideal was embodied. But Hercules embodied what the rest of Greece most valued. His qualities were those the Greeks in general honored and admired. Except for unflinching courage, they were not those that distinguished Theseus. Hercules was the strongest man on earth and he had the supreme self-confidence magnificent physical strength gives. He considered himself on an equality with the gods.

61. The real point of mountain climbing, as of most hard sports, is that it voluntarily tests the human spirit against the fiercest odds, not that it achieves anything more substantial - or even wins the contest, for that matter. For the most part, its heroism is of a subjective kind. It was the fate of Hillary and Tenzing, though, to become very public heroes indeed, and it was a measure of the men that over the years they truly grew into the condition. Perhaps they thought that just being the first to climb a hill was hardly qualification for immortality; perhaps they instinctively realized destiny had another place for them. For they both became, in the course of time, representatives not merely of their particular nations but of half of humanity. Astronauts might justly claim that they were envoys of all humanity; Hillary and Tenzing, in a less spectacular kind, came to stand for the small nations of the world, the young ones, the tucked-away and the up-and-coming.

62. Do you know what I think of history? ... For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so... No one'll ever know everything about Jack. But ... history made Jack what he was ... this lonely, little sick boy ... scarlet fever ... this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history ... reading the Knights of the Round Table ... and he just liked that last song. Then I thought, for Jack history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way, if it made him see the heroes, maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad ... He was such a simple man. But he was so complex, too. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side... his friends were all his old friends; he loved his Irish Mafia.

63. She of all people should have known that it was his desire to be a hero that impelled him now, it was his passion to find out what would happen next, to make the next thing happen. She, if she loved him, should have understood

64. We'll die heroically I'd rather live

65. Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst

66. 'His son thinks that his father is a superman, But you can't blame the kid. The moment he switches on the TV he sees his father, when he travels to school, he sees banners of his father's films along the roads, and whenever his fathers alights people go hysterically, 'Shah Rukh, Shah Rukh!'' - Shashilal Nair

67. Cops give a damn about a negro/pull the trigger kill a nigga, he's a hero

68. Go for it is the only way to be accepted to the circle of cold skulls the circle of your forefathers: Gilgamesh Hector Roland defenders of the kingdom of no frontiers and of the city of ashes Be faithful Go

69. Arma virumque cano.

70. Another effect of the continual appearance of false and biased statement and the absorption of the lie atmosphere is that deeds of real valour, heroism, and physical endurance and genuine cases of inevitable torture and suffering are contaminated and desecrated; the wonderful comradeship of the battlefield becomes almost polluted. Lying tongues cannot speak of deeds of sacrifice to show their beauty or value. So it is that the praise bestowed on heroism by Government and Press always jars, more especially when, as is generally the case with the latter, it is accompanied by cheap and vulgar sentimentality. That is why one instinctively wishes the real heroes to remain unrecognized, so that their record may not be smirched by cynical tongues and pens so well versed in falsehood.

71. It is absurd to believe in the possibility of perpetual peace...Fascist education must be education for battle. Fascism believes in sanctity and heroism.

72. This not the first time a war hero has gotten in my way...

73. There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.

74. Like Lenin Comrade Stalin is a leader of a higher type. He is a mountain eagle, without fear in the fight, who boldly leads the bolshevik party on unexplored roads toward the total victory of Communism.

75. He glutted black ravens on the rampart of the stronghold, though he was no Arthur.

76. '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.'

77. The legacy of heroes - the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

78. Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

79. It is true that there are men who, on the approach of severe pain, hear the very opposite call of command, and never appear more proud, more martial, or more happy than when the storm is brewing; indeed, pain itself provides them with their supreme moments! These are the heroic men, the great pain-bringers of mankind: those few and rare ones who need just the same apology as pain generally - and verily, it should not be denied them. They are forces of the greatest importance for preserving and advancing the species, be it only because they are opposed to smug ease, and do not conceal their disgust at this kind of happiness.

80. Preparatory human beings. - I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day - the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.

81. All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters, either. Every single man in this Army plays a vital role. Don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain.

82. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

83. I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came? - till you and I came over to him? The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow-man.

84. In wartime a man is called a hero. It doesn't make him any braver, and he runs for his life. But at least it's a hero who is running away.

85. Sueno con claustros de marmol donde en silencio divino los heroes, de pie, reposan; ?de noche, a la luz del alma, hablo con ellos: de noche! Estan en fila: paseo entre las filas: las manos de piedra les beso: abren los ojos de piedra: mueven los labios de piedra: tiemblan las barbas de piedra: empunan la espada de piedra: lloran: ?viba la espade en la vaina! Mudo, les beso la mano.

86. Don't be afraid to approach him, don't think you are approaching a god, rather a man greater than others, wiser and more sacrificing than others. You bring him back to life a little whenever you think about him and quite a bit whenever you act as he wanted you to act.

87. And now gentlemen, you must have a national hero!

88. The choice of Rizal as a national hero was a master stroke by the Americans.

89. To echo the first Filipino, you get the Rizal you deserve. (alluding to Rizal's statement, 'You get the government you deserve')

90. It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes.

91. I see her in the image of a Valkyrie maiden, riding her steed into the circle, amid thunder and lightning, and out again, bearing the body of some dead hero across her saddle.

92. The cultural heroine of my generation... before feminist writing got bogged down in victimisation.

93. He absolutely refused to admit, much less accept, defeat when he was literally beaten on Lake Erie. He was that rara avis in our history, the true hero-patriot. ~ Richard Dillon, in We Have Met the Enemy. (1978)

94. In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

95. Routine is the death to heroism.

96. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

97. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

98. These heroes are dead. They died for liberty-they died for us. They are at rest. They sleep in the land they made free, under the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows, the embracing vines. They sleep beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or storm, each in the windowless palace of rest. Earth may run red with other wars-they are at peace. In the midst of battles, in the roar of conflict, they found the serenity of death.

99. The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arete. Arete implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency... or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

100. You are a vain fellow. You want to be a hero. That is why you do such silly things. A hero! ... I don't quite know what that is: but, you see, I imagine that a hero is a man who does what he can. The others do not do it.