“Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
“You cannot be a hero without being a coward.”
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
“The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.”
“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.”
“And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. 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.”
“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.”
“One brave deed makes no hero.”
“Calculation never made a hero.”
“A hero is a man who is afraid to run away.”
“A hero is someone right who doesn't change.”
“Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.”
“There are heroes in evil as well as in good.”
“What is a society without a heroic dimension?”
“A hero is someone we can admire without apology.”
“Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.”
“One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.”
“Be your own hero, it's cheaper than a movie ticket.”
“Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.”
“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”
“The main thing about being a hero is to know when to die.”
“What makes a hero truly great is that they never despair.”