“My heroes are and were my parents. I can't see having anyone else as my heroes.”
“No heroine can create a hero through love of one, but she can give birth to one.”
“We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.”
“You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes, they waste their deaths on us.”
“Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.”
“We can't all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”
“The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.”
“Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.”
“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.”
“No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.”
“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.”
“And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?”
“True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.”
“Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.”
“The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.”
“Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.”
“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.”
“Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.”
“The more characteristic American hero in the earlier day, and the more beloved type at all times, was not the hustler but the whittler.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.”
“The prudent sees only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both, diminishes those, makes these preponderate, and conquers.”
“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.”
“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.”