Quotes about heroism

If you ask me, the difference between a hero and a coward is that a hero find some damn-fool way to con himself into going ahead instead of doing the sensible thing.

“Credomancy may seek to exploit the human desire for a tidy narrative where an unblemished romantic hero vanquishes all obstacles, but such ideals have very little to do with reality. Reality requires pragmatism and compromise. Men fail. Women fail. There are no heroes, only human beings who somehow find the strength to behave heroically, no matter how many times they have been unable to do so in the past. If you understand that, Miss Edwards—if you truly and deeply understand that, then you will understand the most powerful thing anyone with a heart can understand.”

“And what’s that?” Emily said softly.

“That love is not enough. But it’s a start.”

But mere technical details can be worked out any time. All a hero needs is grit.

Perhaps it is fortunate that most heroes who die for their people cannot come back to see what the people do with that hard-bought life and freedom.

“Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess,” he said quietly. “Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their conscience with the gift of survival.”

Miriamele thought about the obvious truth of what Cadrach had said as they walked on, but could not understand why it made her so unutterably sad.

It is hard to look a hero when mounted on a pig.

Nothing tarnishes a hero as much as failure.

"He likes the stories where the knights fight monsters."

"Sometimes the knights are the monsters, Bran."

You can define heroism any way you want to, but that’s it for me. It’s sticking in there no matter what. Whether it’s a pilot fighting his plane down through that last mile, or switchboard operators and doctors and nurses staying at their posts while the bombs blitz London, or even the dance band on the Titanic playing while the ship goes down…

It’s fulfilling your responsibilities.

"We irritated him, he told me. Why did he get himself killed for us?" "Because he was a hero. And that is what heroes do. You understand?"

"Heroes," that's what we were, that's what our leaders wanted, that's what our people felt they needed. After all that has happened, not just in this war, but in so many wars before: Algeria, Indochina, the Nazis... you understand what I am saying... you see the sorrow and pity? We understood what the American President said about "reclaiming our confidence"; we understood it more than most. We needed heroes, new names and places to restore our pride.

I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.