John Glenn Quotes

I am certainly not a martyr kind of a person. I love my life. But if one has to, then there is nothing more nobler a cause that I can think of.

Once you become dedicated to a cause, personal security is not the goal. What will happen to you personally does not matter. My cause, my race, is worth dying for.

Heroism--that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.

Look, I would say that anyone who does this work and doesn't have a strain of idealism is an adrenaline junkie or completely narcissistic. There is no other justification. You're risking your life, and if anything happens, it's our families who suffer tremendously.

He would take the blow so you didn't have to.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

To give one's life is a right only when one gives it unselfishly.

I'd gladly take a grenade, if it meant saving Newark.

Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends.

I wish to be a martyr, and I don't fear death.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

For months people have been begging me to come here for this Kamikaze operation. We will die well. The fact that we are taking a role in a great moment is history is a great honor.

The youth movement here must aspire to a martyrdom death…. The young must be first at the front line - don’t hide at the back. You must be at the front, die as martyrs and all your sins will be forgiven. This is how to achieve forgiveness.

The cause is not worth dying for.

… from the dawn of history to the present time, men have paid the homage of their gratitude and admiration to the memory of those who nobly sacrifice their lives, that their fellow-men may live in safety and in honor.

I will climb the gallows gladly and show to the world as to how bravely the revolutionaries can sacrifice themselves for the cause.

Blessed are they whose bodies get destroyed in the service of others.

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong — for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved.

What makes a heroine? I think I can answer that. A heroine is a woman who risks going too far in order to find out how far one can go for a cause greater than herself.

The thing that we have going for us is that people are willing to sacrifice themselves.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

There's a scene I particularly like in 'Betrayed' where Shane has been shot in the side. Yet he drives to a small airport, checks out the Rockfort plane and flies himself and Elena to safety. Only when he knows they are out of danger does he allow himself to sit down on the couch and admit he's injured - to a horrified Elena.