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We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually.

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.

Fame means so little about somebody when you come right down to it.

Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.

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.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.

My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.

To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.