We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
—Tom Robbins
I'm not the heroic type. I was beaten up by Quakers.
—Woody Allen
What is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy today that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have stood in the vanguard of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.
—John B. Gough
As you get older, it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
—Ernest Hemingway
The whole point in bein' a hero is to do somethin' greater than yerself. It'd be easy to do it for the glory or the girls. We're bigger men than that.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.
—Bette Davis
There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains. the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.
—Bob Dylan
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
—John Barth
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our heroes are people and people are flawed. Don't let that taint the thing you love.
—Umberto Eco
America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.
—Will Rogers
Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is.
—Will Rogers
It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame. This is the tragedy of the world. For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile.
—Alice Walker