Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is sensitive; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture -- in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

- Dworkin, Andrea

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Shaw, George Bernard

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

Cooley, Charles Horton

My heroes are and were my parents. I can't see having anyone else as my heroes.

Jordan, Michael

What makes a hero truly great is that they never despair.

Thompson, Roy

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

Genet, Jean

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Mencken, H. L.

No heroine can create a hero through love of one, but she can give birth to one.

Paul, Jean

10.

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 it be obeyed.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

11.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Eliot, George

12.

Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

13.

It is said, that no one is a hero to their butler. The reason is, that it requires a hero to recognize a hero. The butler, however, will probably know well how to estimate his equals.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Churchill, Winston

15.

Dworkin, Andrea

16.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

17.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

20.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

21.

We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.

Hayes, Helen

22.

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.

Renan, Ernest

23.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Lessing, Doris

24.

The more characteristic American hero in the earlier day, and the more beloved type at all times, was not the hustler but the whittler.

Sullivan, Mark

25.

Being a hero is about the shortest lived profession on earth.

Rogers, Will

26.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

Hegel, Georg

27.

I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.

Garibaldi, Giuseppe

28.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Sarton, May

29.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

30.

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

31.

The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.

Wilson, Angus

32.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

33.

If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

Shakespeare, William

34.

The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.

Adler, Felix

35.

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

Rogers, Will

36.

Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

Scott, Robert Falcon

37.

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.

Johnson, Gerald W.

38.

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.

Howe, Edgar Watson

39.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

40.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Miller, Henry

41.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

42.

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.

James, William

43.

True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

Beecher, Henry Ward

45.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

Mailer, Norman

46.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Durrell, Lawrence

47.

They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.

Bangs, Lester

48.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

49.

Be your own hero, it's cheaper than a movie ticket.

Horton, Doug

50.

The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.

Cleaver, Eldridge