"We don't have to turn to our history books for heroes. They're all around us."

President Reagan

"Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes."

Benjamin Disraeli

"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost."

Arthur Ashe

"If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly… But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought , and have to choose, to be human at all … why then, perhaps we must stand fast a little--even at the risk of being heroes."

St. Thomas Moore in A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt

"True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat."

Napoleon Bonaparte

"The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A hero is a man who is afraid to run away."

English Proverb

""It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle."

General Norman Schwarzkopf

"The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise the hero sees both diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers."

Johann Kaspar Lavater

" We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look."

President Reagan

"Who is a hero? He who turns his enemy into a friend."

The Talmud

"I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom."

Bob Dylan

"When the first Superman movie came out I was frequently asked "What is a hero?" …My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences… Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles."

Christopher Reeve

"When you feel the world is against you or you give up hope, you look at your heroes and say, "They were able to do it. They had hard times and a lot of opposition, but they got through it." Then you feel, "I can do it too."

John Leguizamo

"Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men."

Thomas Carlyle

"If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes."

Mark Twain

"It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes."

Louis Pasteur

"I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel."

Florence Nightingale