Quotes About Heroism

The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or "leader" may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue—not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character.

We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.

Selam duruÅŸ, esas vaziyet, merasim geçiÅŸi, tüfek as, saÄŸa dön, sola dön, topuk vur, küfür, azar, binlerce eziyet! Biz görevimizi baÅŸka türlü düÅŸünmüÅŸtük; bir de bakt?k ki, kahramanl??a, sirk atlar? gibi yetiÅŸtiriliyoruz.

The misery of millions is too big a price to pay for the heroics of a few.

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

There are no heroes here, at least not of the Schindler's List variety, but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace.

He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds.

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

Cultural relativity is a pitiless weapon precisely because it sets our hero-systems up on end.

They would claim that true heroism for man could only be cosmic, the service of the highest powers, the Creator, the meaning of creation.

When the average person…cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the failure of depression and terrible guilt.

By making your hero-system the service of your Creator, you have the distinction of making a gift of your life no matter what the special quality of that gift is: as you last out your life with courage, forbearance, and dignity you affirm your divine calling by simply living it out.

Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth.

Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a "religion" whether it thinks so or not: Soviet "religion" and Maoist "religion" are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer "religion," no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives.

At what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic? No doubt, one of the reasons Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.

There is a driving force behind a mystery that we cannot understand, and it includes more than reason alone. The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism. Science, after all, is a credo that has attempted to absorb into itself and to deny the fear of life and death; and it is only one more competitor in the spectrum of roles for cosmic heroics.

Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world.

to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

I fear nothing when I am doing right,' said Jack. 'Then,' said the lady in the red cap, 'you are one of those who slay giants.

His men knew they could trust him not to be officious over such an unfortunate (though by no means isolated) friendly-fire incident, and to tell the dead Guardsman's family that he had died heroically. Sometimes in war, as he was to say later, the truth has to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.

True heroism consists of being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge to the combat.' Napoleon on board HMS Northumberland, 1815

Because if everyone in this world waits for another Hero to save them, I don't know if this world will survive. And if I'm content to wait and let another person risk their life for me, I don't know if I'm worth saving.