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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 try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be common, nor the common heroic.

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

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.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

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

There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains. the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.

Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

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.

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

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

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.

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 idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.

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