"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes, they waste their deaths on us."

Andrews, C. D. on Heroes and Heroism
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"Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes."

Anouilh, Jean on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story."

Barth, John on Heroes and Heroism
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"What is a society without a heroic dimension?"

Baudrillard, Jean on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat."

Bonaparte, Napoleon on Heroes and Heroism
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"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. on Heroes and Heroism
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"Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes."

Brecht, Bertolt on Heroes and Heroism
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"Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men."

Carlyle, Thomas on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward."

Chesterfield, Lord on Heroes and Heroism
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"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

Churchill, Winston on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion."

Coolidge, Calvin on Heroes and Heroism
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"The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example."

Disraeli, Benjamin on Heroes and Heroism
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"Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were."

Durrell, Lawrence on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom."

Dylan, Bob on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"Every hero becomes a bore at last."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on Heroes and Heroism
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"Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on Heroes and Heroism
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"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."

Enright, D. J. on Heroes and Heroism
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"A hero is someone right who doesn't change."

Foreman, George on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in."

George, David Lloyd on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on Heroes and Heroism
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"Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one."

Gracian, Baltasar on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too."

Hayes, Helen on Heroes and Heroism
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"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 on Heroes and Heroism
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"Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions."

Hegel, Georg on Heroes and Heroism
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