Johan Huizinga Quotes

In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

The only reason anyone ever called me a hero is because I get this paper, here.

I'm no hero. Heroes don't come back. Survivors return home. Heroes never come home. If anyone thinks I'm a hero, I'm not.

Heroes don't get anything but dead.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die.

The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.

It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Men, today we die a little.

To die for one's country is such a worthy fate that all compete for so beautiful a death.

Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

We remember the heroes who ran into the burning buildings to rescue those trapped inside, and the dauntless passengers on Flight 93 who laid down their lives to save others, including almost certainly those of us in the U.S. Capitol.

They never fail who die in a great cause.

You don't send a man to his death because you want a hero.

Soldiers willingly, sometimes foolishly, risk their own lives to keep their comrades out of enemy hands.

I say that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty.

The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets.

A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many owed so much to so few,' - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not.

If I were the blushing kind, I would blush to be called a hero.

The real heroes were my good buddies who died during the battles.

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

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.