"We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look." (President Ronald Reagan)"A hero is a man who is afraid to run away." (English proverb)
"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer." (Poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes." (Benjamin Disraeli)
"As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary." (Novelist Ernest Hemingway)
"You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes." (Astronaut Walter M. Schirra, Sr.)
"Without heroes, we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go." (Novelist Bernard Malamud)
"Celebrities are people who make news, but heroes are people who make history. Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities." (Historian Daniel J. Boorstin)"I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel." (Humanitarian Florence Nightingale)
"The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat." (Writer Robert Louis Stevenson)
"Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men." (Historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle)"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else." (Novelist Umberto Eco)
"The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers." (Theologian and poet Johann Kaspar Lavater)"Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive." (Poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine)
"If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all … why then, perhaps we must stand fast a little--even at the risk of being heroes." (Robert Bolt's character, Sir Thomas More in the play, A Man for All Seasons)
(The hero photos in this section are of, from top to bottom, Neil Armstrong, Edith Cavell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Thor Heyerdahl, Audie Murphy, Harriet Tubman, and missionary William Carey.)
