A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.


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.


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


A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.


A hero is someone right who doesn't change.


A hero is someone we can admire without apology.


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.


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.


And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?


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.


Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.


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.


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


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


Calculation never made a hero.


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.


Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.


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.


Every hero becomes a bore at last.


Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

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