Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

The great destroyers of nations and men are comfort, plenty and security. A coward gets scared and quits. A hero gets scared, but still goes on.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes --ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

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

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

Thompson, Roy

Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.

Coolidge, Calvin

10.

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

11.

It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

Schwarzkopf, Norman

12.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

13.

The main thing about being a hero is to know when to die.

Rogers, Will

14.

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

Rogers, Will

15.

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

16.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

18.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He 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, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Chandler, Raymond

19.

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

20.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

21.

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

22.

It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?

Winterson, Jeanette

23.

What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.

George, David Lloyd

24.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

25.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

26.

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

27.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

29.

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

30.

A hero is a man who is afraid to run away.

Proverb, English

31.

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

Rogers, Will

32.

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.

33.

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

Johnson, Gerald W.

34.

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

Miller, Henry

35.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Gracian, Baltasar

36.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

37.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Lessing, Doris

38.

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

Jordan, Michael

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

Hegel, Georg

42.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

47.

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

48.

The great destroyers of nations and men are comfort, plenty and security. A coward gets scared and quits. A hero gets scared, but still goes on.

49.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

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