heroes quotes

  • Political history isfar too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young.Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      A Certain World.

  • To be human at all† we must stand fast a littleeven at the risk of being heroes.

    - Robert Oxton Bolt
      Thomas More.  A Man for All Seasons.

  • Unglu«  cklich das Land das keine Helden hat. Unglu«  cklich das Land das Helden n o« tig hat. Unlucky the land that has no heroes. Unlucky the land that has need of heroes.

    - Bertolt Eugen Friedrich Brecht
         ANDREA:GALILEI:ANDREA:GALILEI:1938  Leben des Galilei ('The Life of Galileo'), sc.13.

  • I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.

    - Anatole Broyard
      Aroused by Books.

  • But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings should not play at. Nations would do well To extort their truncheons from the puny hands Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world.

    -William Cowper
      The Task, bk.5,'The Winter Morning Walk', l.187^92.

  •    What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.

    - David, 1st Earl Lloyd George (of Dwyfor)
      Speech at  Wolverhampton, Nov, at the end of  World War I.

  • We call the heroes of the past heroes of production.We feel entitled to call the present day magazine heroes 'idols ofconsumption'.Indeed, almosteveryoneofthem is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time.

    - Leo Lowenthal
      'The Triumph of Mass Idols', collected in Literature and Mass Culture (1984).

  • Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed.

    - Margaret Mitchell
       Ashley Wilkes. Gone  with  the Wind, ch.31.

  • For thefuture I cease,Deathapproaches with little delay, Since the dragons of Laune and Lane and Lee are destroyed; I'll follow the heroes far from the light of day, The princes myancestors followed before Christ died.

    - Egan Gaelic name  Aodhaga  n OŁ   Rathaille O'Rahilly
    c.1729  Closing lines of his last known poem, translated from the Irish by Owen Dudley Edwards.

  • Thisbook isnot about heroes.Englishpoetry isnot yet fit to speak of them.

    -Wilfred Owen
      Poems (published1920), preface.

  • In ancient shadows and twilights Where childhood had strayed, The world's great sorrows were born And its heroes were made. In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.

    - GeorgeWilliam pseudonym  Ó Russell
      Enchantment and Other Poems,'Germinal'.

  • If I were fierce and bald and short of breath I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

    - Siegfried Louvain Sassoon
      'Base Details'.

  • Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

    - Hunter S(tockton) Thompson
      'Those DaringYoung Men InTheir Flying Machines†Ain't WhatThey UsedTo Be!', in Pageant, Sep.

  • We cannot have heroes to dine with us. There are none. And were those heroes to be had, we should not like them†the persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, becausetheyare so good.

    - Anthony Trollope
      Of Frank Greystock.The Eustace Diamonds, ch.35.

  • Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces. Mantua brought me life,Calabria death; now Naples holds me: I sang of flocks and farms and heroes.

    -Virgil full name Publius Vergilius Maro
      BC  Epitaph on his tomb near Naples, supposedly dictated on his deathbed. Quoted in DonatusVitaVergilii,'Life ofVirgil'.

  • Traters†are a unfortunate class of people.If they wasn't they wouldn't be traters. They conspire to bust up a countrythey fail, and they're traters. They bust her, and they become statesmen and heroes.

    - Artemus pseudonym of  Charles Farrar Browne Ward
      ArtemusWard in London and Other Papers,'TheTower of London'.

  • It will do us no harm to retool our imaginations. AIDS is a major revolution in how writers write† Our heroes and heroines will have to change. The only thing AIDS is good for is fiction.Writers will have to thinkdifferently.

    - Fay originally Franklin Birkinshaw Weldon
      In The Guardian,7 Mar.

  • I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. Theyall want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enjoy.

    -Jeanette Winterson
      Sexing the Cherry.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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