Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

––F. Scott Fitzgerald

Heroes as great have died, and yet shall fall.

                             ––Homer

                                            

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

––Will Rogers

A light supper, a good night’s sleep, and a fine morning have often made a hero of the same man who by indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward.

––Earl of Chesterfield

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

––Ralph Waldo Emerson

See, the conquering hero comes!

Sound the trumpets, beat the drums!

––Thomas Morell

Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes.

Galileo: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.

––Bertolt Brecht

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,

Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

––Alexander Pope

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.

––Walter M. Schirra, Sr

The real hero is always a hero by mistake: he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

––Umberto Eco

Here lived and loved another race of beings. Beneath the same sun that rolls over your heads the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer….The Indian of falcon glance and lion bearing, the theme of the touching ballad, the hero of the pathetic tale, is gone.

––Charles Sprague

While the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”

And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

––Edgar Allan Poe