Top 150 Heroic Quotes

I’m not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it’s quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It’s just full of all these open wounds we don’t really know what to do with.

I never saw a true representation – an iconic hero – for myself. It just got boring, reading about all these really powerful and heroic white guys.

My father was this big, tough guy, almost heroic in proportion to me as a child. It was only later that I saw how fearful he was.

I am proud to have played a small part in ensuring that no veteran‘s heroic service will be cast aside due to prejudice.

Christianity is not the faith of the complacent, the comfortable or of the timid. It demands and creates heroic souls like Wesley, Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, John Paul the Second, and Billy Graham. Each showed, in their own way, the relentless and powerful influence of the message of Jesus Christ.

I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it’s not part of a sensible way of living. It’s a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

If we cannot come together to pause, to respect our dead and the heroic lives of meaning they led, then ours is truly a civilization lost.

Some days it is a heroic act just to refuse the paralysis of fear and straighten up and step into another day.

Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.

People saw me as being heroic, but I was no more heroic than I was with other injuries I had, like the lacerated kidney I suffered during the 1990 World Series. It’s just that people haven‘t known anyone with a lacerated kidney, but everyone can relate to someone with cancer.

I have the greatest respect for single parents who struggle and sacrifice, trying against almost superhuman odds to hold the family together. They should be honored and helped in their heroic efforts. But any mother‘s or father’s task is much easier where there are two functioning parents in the home.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it’s pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

Books about technology start-ups have a pattern. First, there’s the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally, the grand finale: immense wealth and secular sainthood. Let’s call it the Jobs Narrative.

The two genres that probably take the most flack in literature – they are young adult and romance right now. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are genres that provide places for women to express desire and love for adventure, for the opportunity to be placed to heroic roles.

Outside of my family, I was always inspired by true heroic stories of leadership and survival. For example, the story of the Shackleton expedition, when their ship became lodged in the Antarctic ice pack while exploring.

I will always be the hopeless romantic, more often pathetic than heroic.

People aren’t universally heroic.

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.

The quality of films out there depends on how much responsibility we’re willing to take. I try to play women who are positive and heroic.

I do not subscribe to a feminism that demands perfection or super heroic nobility of women. But I do insist that putting women at the service of patriarchy is no victory for us.

There’s many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.

I think there are good men and women in all decades. We’ve grown cynical. And look at what we do to all our heroes: Churchill, FDR, Kennedy, they all had affairs. But heroic things happen every day.

I walk out of my apartment, and St. Vincent’s is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.

I wasn’t heroic because I was never in danger.

The news of the open military help to Franco from Hitler and Mussolini, and the heroic resistance of the people of Madrid, Barcelona and the big cities fired a widespread wish to help the Republic and its people.

When you’re younger, you’re going to be cast as the heroic, earnest leading man.

My mother’s father, Hobart Cromwell, was a bacteriologist with Abbott Laboratories in suburban Chicago. I never got to know him well, as he died very young, but he was always a heroic figure in our family, wise and gentle and intelligent by reputation, with the courage to fight against the McCarthyites.

Villains are as important as the hero. Without the right villain, the hero isn’t heroic enough.

Gemmell’s name guarantees a satisfying story and a thumping good read. I recommend all his heroic creations – ‘Druss the axeman,’ ‘the Jerusalem man,’ among others – but my favourite has to be ‘Waylander’: Clint Eastwood with a crossbow and the same ‘Make my day, punk‘ attitude.

I find Jessica Jones a much more interesting character to write for than Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is so noble and heroic, and I don’t find that as interesting as one who’s really damaged and flawed and has post-traumatic stress disorder.

In my early music-loving days, I thought Beethoven was a bit bombastic, a bit heroic, a bit, well, big.

People of my generation are used to collecting the heroic boys. And they’re used to paying a lot of money for heroic boys. I don’t make a third of what a guy would make.

Many single mothers do a heroic job looking after their children, as mine did with us; but as she found, it becomes twice as hard to set boundaries with half the number of parents.

Everybody was trying to put me in action movies and heroic roles, and I wanted to find more complex things. They just didn’t suit my taste, so I thought, ‘OK, I have to be brave enough to say no.’ And for a while, that hurt me immeasurably in the Hollywood world.

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues – compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious – are far from conventionally heroic.

Some are in it for the money, which is fine. Some of them are in it to be a movie star; that’s another reason. Some actors – and this I never understand – will only play likeable characters. And if they’re not likeable, they change them to be heroic.

The script of ‘Shaapit’ was such that the leading man couldn’t be shown indulging into anything heroic.

There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It’s great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That’s OK, but it should be on the side. It’s not the ultimate thing.

There’s an idea of the Plains as the middle of nowhere, something to be contemptuous of. But it’s really a heroic place.

People throughout time have grieved, have fallen in love, have fallen out of love. We are sometimes petty and sometimes heroic, and we have been that way forever.

All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I’ve always had a weakness for heroic imagery.

I make dark dramas, movies about people living in desperate fear who then overcome that fear and find a heroic side to themselves.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

To me, it feels like ‘The Doctor‘ has to have a long coat, and that’s something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there’s something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn’t quite fit.

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man’s cruelty and baseness.

We insist on celebrating lone heroic path-finders, but even the most admired and the most successful inventors are part of a more remarkable supply chain of innovators who are largely ignored for the simpler mythology of one man or one eureka moment.

In the 1930s, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange produced images of sharecroppers and Okies, which drew attention both to the conditions in which these unfortunates found themselves and to their heroic fortitude.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

I was not the young heroic model for ‘Hamlet.’ I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.

The proud decades of victorious advance of the Juche-oriented youth movement are associated with the invaluable blood and sweat and heroic exploits of the young people who fought self-sacrificingly for the Party, the leader, the country, and the people.

I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing.

Among the events of John McCain‘s five-and-a-half years of imprisonment and torture in North Vietnam, probably the most heroic, and surely the most celebrated, was his refusal to accept an early release from his captors.

Believe me, ‘tis a godlike thing to lend; to owe is a heroic virtue.

We don’t tend to write about disease in fiction – not just teen novels but all American novels – because it doesn’t fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.

Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.

I think it is rather heroic to go into a war zone where everyone is trying to kill you, and you have no way of shooting back.

I don’t think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

I wanted to do something heroic if I was going to be on TV. And the first thing that appeals to me once I have decided I don’t want to be the bad guy is to find things that are not black and white.

I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.

That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they’re always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that’s just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.

That’s what heroic stories do for us. They show us the way. They remind us of the good we are capable of.

When they saddle the leading man with violence it makes the characters look weak. If a man is a heroic type he doesn’t have to resort to violence. How many successful men in the world have to settle problems with their fists?

I’d like to think Fleabag’s honesty makes her heroic in spite of her actions.

The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.

People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We’re only human beings.

Generations of heroic Americans have made America more inclusive, more expansive, and more just.

I guess I’m always drawn to the underbelly of someone, really, as opposed to how heroic they are. I don’t judge those sorts of people.

Catwoman isn’t a ‘joiner.’ She’s a solo operator. She isn’t naturally heroic; she’s fairly selfish.

All of world’s eyes are trained on the Games. So winning at that stage is heroic. It is a different feeling altogether and cannot be explained in words.

Without a dog, you’ll be without at least one creature who thinks you are the smartest, most decent and heroic human being on the planet.

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

At its core, all authentic growth depends on more customers wanting more of what your company offers. Any other drivers – pricing gimmicks, heroic marketing efforts, forced acquisitions – are ultimately destructive.

As human beings, of course, we’re all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there’s room for me to express them, that’s a part I’d love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.

I wanted to write an adventure in the old-fashioned way, something to which I could apply the adjective ‘rollicking’ and not feel embarrassed. But I’ve never liked my heroes to be too heroic, so they ended up being a bunch of criminals instead.

I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F – it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.

Most lawyers aren’t trial lawyers. Most lawyers, even trial lawyers, don’t get their problems solved in a courtroom. We like to go to court. It seems heroic to go to court. We think we’re the new, great advocates, better than anything we’ve seen on TV, and we come home exhilarated by having gone to court.

As a writer, I can’t be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who’s been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.

I think that always makes it fun, trying to create a heroic character and putting your own twist on it and injecting your own personality into it.

We believe that business is good because it creates value. It is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange; it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

A lot of the characters I’ve played before are heroic or invincible in some ways and not tuned into fear and anxiety and pain.

The most heroic thing you can do is tell someone that you love them.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

I am a big believer in the power of journalism; it’s a heroic pursuit.

I think we are drawn to anti-heroes because that is what most of us are most of the time and it is good to see that we are heroic.

I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.

A hero could be anyone who does something heroic, irrespective of the gender.

This obsession with leadership… It’s not neutral; it’s American, this idea of the heroic leader who comes in on a white horse to save the day. I think it’s killing American companies.

With all due respect to the other writers, I don’t want to disparage any other writers; I don’t want to have to invent a bigger villain than Deathstroke so Deathstroke can seem heroic fighting this bigger villain. I’d rather just have Deathstroke be who is, and he’s kind of a bastard.

Over the course of my creative life, I’ve trafficked in broken, heroic mothers.

Everybody’s saying, you know, ‘You’re so heroic and so on despite of the polio that you had and so on.’ Look, I had polio when I was four. So when you’re four years old, you know, you get used to things very, very quickly.

Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?

I think the real heroic teachers are the ones who work with kids, like my mom and my sister do.

Like prospecting in the 19th century, reconnaissance of the asteroids would of necessity take place in an arena where trouble is likely and help is distant. Heroic stories of individual triumph and failure, set on landscapes never seen by humankind, are in the cards.

The 1960s was a heroic age in the history of the art of communication – the audacious movers and shakers of those times bear no resemblance to the cast of characters in ‘Mad Men.’

Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise.

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

I salute all the nations of the Arab Spring and I salute the heroic people of Syria who are striving for freedom, democracy and reform.

He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great.

I’m always interested in getting to know people, and that means vilified people as much as those celebrated. You find out that heroes aren’t always so heroic, and villains have some bit of humanity in them.

My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler – to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.

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.

Let’s face it: the present self is present. It’s in control. It’s in power right now. It has these strong, heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth. And the future self is not even around. It’s off in the future. It’s weak. It doesn’t even have a lawyer present.

Failures to heroic minds are the stepping stones to success.

Our Party conferred the honourable title, ‘The Heroic Working Class of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il,’ on our working class that supported the great leaders‘ ideas and leadership with loyalty.

My younger brother‘s death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In ‘Fallen Angels‘ I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.

Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes – that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it’s… all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There’s billions spent on rockets up there, and there’s millions starving down here. It don’t make sense to me.

It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.

As well as tasting fantastic, blackberries are good for you. Anthocyanin isn’t just a pigment, it’s a flavonoid, a heroic antioxidant! The stuff of superfoods!

The truth is that ideas matter… If we really want to repair what is wrong in our society, it is going to require not just new policies or even new behaviors, but nothing less heroic than new ideas.

Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up – with that heroic Delta force – people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment.

Heroic people take risks to themselves to help others. There’s nothing heroic about accepting $5 million to go out and run around chasing a ball, although you may show fortitude or those other qualities while you do it.

A heroic nature is very Greek.

Over the years, the writers at DC Comics softened Wonder Woman’s powers in ways that would have infuriated Marston. During the 1960s, she was hardly wondrous at all, less a heroic warrior than the tomboyish girl next door. It was no longer clear whether she was meant to empower the girls or captivate the boys.

Some people might say my coming out after just winning the MVP award is heroic, and I understand that.

Baseball is a spirited race of man against man, reflex against reflex. A game of inches. Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered, or booed. And then becomes a statistic.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

I like to turn up my collar when I’m leaving the theatre and feel like I’m some heroic comedian figure.

Because of England‘s lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.

Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

I guess I have an aversion to writing about big events and heroic actions. The everyday has always seemed most important to me in writing, probably because I believe people reveal themselves in how they deal with small details.

I suppose there must be some way in which I’m compelled to show some side of myself – or of people – that’s paranoid and fraught and beleaguered and downtrodden, just as Tom Cruise wants to show that he’s terrifyingly upbeat and terrifyingly heroic all the time.

He would still see it as his duty to shut up and get on with it, not cause any trouble. In our own time we’ve made a hero of the rebel, and it’s more heroic to speak up.

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.

I like characters who aren’t typically heroic and come to some sort of epiphany about themselves.

One of the rules I try to follow is that normal people are going to be involved even in heroic events.

The Ultimate Warrior was explosive, confident, heroic, and ready to get into battle. He was a character who had his own set of rules.

There’s always something heroic and romantic about taking a stand against the powers that be.

Somehow super power and hero are so synonymous that they get combined into one word, ‘superhero,’ whereas I’m kind of more interested in separating those two ideas out. You have characters with super powers who may or may not be heroic, because human beings aren’t all heroic. I tend to be drawn to antiheros.

In the pain, the agony, and the heroic endeavors of life, we pass through a refiner’s fire, and the insignificant and the unimportant in our lives can melt away like dross and make our faith bright, intact, and strong.

It is an Englishman who turns out to be the real villain of ‘The Moonstone.’ By contrast, the three Indian priests who dedicate their lives to returning the jewel to its proper home in the temple, though they have nothing personal to gain by doing so, are positively heroic.

When I hear a guy lost a battle to cancer, that really did bother me, that that’s a term. It implies that he failed and that somebody else that defeated cancer is heroic and courageous.

I’ve not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent.

Playing big, heroic characters with heart is always a lot of fun. I enjoy making movies like that, and a lot of people love to live vicariously through those characters.

Freedom requires no effort to enjoy but requires heroic efforts to preserve.

My stepfather, Steve Mallonee, is a retired Miami Beach firefighter, loved and adored by many. After numerous years of heroic work, saving lives through fire and heavy smoke, he has developed a very fatal lunge disease called Pulmonary Fibrosis.

The idea of sacrifice is integral to the John Henry myth. Heroic figures have to die in order for us to have our stories; we live and stand on their bones.

Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

I think for some reason we’re conditioned in movies that the protagonist must be heroic or redeemable in some way, whereas in theater, that’s not a necessary.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

But despite their heroic acts, the Vietnam Veterans of America continued to struggle to establish a combat badge in honor of these brave pilots and medics.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

I think on some level, that’s a fear that exists in everybody, that if we’re tested, we won’t make the courageous choice. We won’t make the decision that would make us heroic. We make the decision that would reveal us to be all too human.

You don’t need to be a fan of wars or militarism to note that heroic action – whether being prepared to be jailed as a conscientious objector or putting your life on the line by joining the resistance – creates a sense of meaning when society faces a huge challenge.

A lot of action heroes, we’re told they are heroic primarily because they commit violence upon the bad guy. It can be cathartic; it can be thrilling. But at some point, I think you want more from your heroes than just the ability and willingness to pummel someone.

We are closing corporate loopholes so we are hardly being heroic to close the combined reporting loophole. I think 28 or 30 other states have done it and a lot of those states will be trying to get Amazon.