Heroic Quotes - Page 19

• I feel like I'll be defined more so by ... when I get a chance to play roles where I'm the father/husband. I'd like to continue with the action stuff, but when I get to play the father/husband role, I think that will be the time where I'm playing who I really am. I look forward to playing those kind of heroic characters, the types that are usually associated with Denzel Washington.

  Michael Jai White

  Husband, Father, Character

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• Many heroic things happened during slavery. And remember that there was a national movement away from it even at the time. The era of Reconstruction and then the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction sent us in a tailspin. Then we had the Civil Rights movement. Now we have our first non-white president. We have a pattern of moving apart and then coming back together throughout the history of this country. Each time, we come closer.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Country, Moving, Rights

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

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• My characters are never heroic. They are mostly lost and trying to find the right door to open and they end up opening the wrong doors.

  Gaspar Noe

  Character, Doors, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I was thirteen, I had a nervous breakdown, and I was put into this grown-up mental hospital with all these 50-, 60-year-old men and women. This big, Victorian mental house. There were like five boys in there, all my age, looked after by this woman who was 22 or 23. And it was like "Empire of the Sun" meets "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"-type of arrangement where you've got this young boy overcoming and becoming heroic in the face of this awful place.

  Duncan Roy

  Boys, Men, Years

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic.

  Michael Emerson

  Thinking, People, Villain

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• One of the differences between now and then is that the idea of body image is a much bigger issue now. Back then, just being kind of heavy and barrel-chested passed for heroic. Now, you wouldn't dare to play a hero without a lot of dieting and various specialised abdomen machines. But that was one of the things which was interesting about it and I did want to portray because there's good and bad.

  Ben Affleck

  Hero, Issues, Play

  Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• We are always in awe of what the donors have done in terms of providing of themselves to the recipients. It really is a heroic act because people take on themselves not only a risk of death but also pain-and-suffering in order for their loved one to get the benefit of the liver transplant.

  John Roberts

  Pain, Order, People

  Source: www.ucsfbenioffchildrens.org

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• The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.

  Paul Goodman

  Jobs, Real, Hard Work

  Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.41, New York Review of Books

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• The 'black armband' view of our history reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. I take a very different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud of than which we should be ashamed.

  John Howard

  Believe, Views, Racism

  Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, 1996.

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• Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.

  Kenneth Clark

  Passion, Animal, Expression

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• All the entertainment and talk of history is nothing almost but fighting and killing: and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerors (who for the most part are but the great butchers of mankind) farther mislead growing youth, who by this means come to think slaughter the laudable business of mankind, and the most heroic of virtues.

  John Locke

  War, Mean, Fighting

  John Locke (1752). “Some Thoughts concerning Education ... The eleventh edition”, p.174

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• Perhaps in our presence, the most heroic deed on earth is done in some silent spirit, the loftiest purpose cherished, the most generous sacrifice made, and we do not suspect it. I believe this greatness to be most common among the multitude, whose names are never heard.

  William Ellery Channing

  Believe, Sacrifice, Greatness

  William Ellery Channing (1839). “Self-culture: An Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, Delivered at Boston, September, 1838”, p.8

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• I thought, This is fabulous. It sent shivers up my spine. I thought, What kinds of people are these that would produce this kind of music in a camp? All the prison camp stories I've seen, and heard of, were about the heroism of men. As I researched this and heard the music, I realized that women were heroic too, on just as grand a scale. And their treatment was just as appalling.

  Bruce Beresford

  Men, People, Crafts

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• Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Thinking, Effort

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• No leader did more for his country than Winston Churchill. Brave, magnanimous, traditional, he was like a king-general from Britain's heroic past. His gigantic qualities set him apart from ordinary humanity; there seemed no danger he feared, no effort too great for his limitless energies.

  Gretchen Rubin

  Country, Kings, Past

  Gretchen Rubin (2004). “Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life”, p.12, Random House

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• Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.

  Stefan Zweig

  Gratitude, Kings, Age

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• But nothing is better than a truth which appears not to have the semblance of truth. There is always something incomprehensible about the great heroic deeds performed by humanity because they rise so far beyond the mediocre measure of mere mortals; but it is always only because of the incredible feats that human beings have accomplished that humanity recovers its faith in itself.

  Stefan Zweig

  Truth, Heroic Deeds, Humanity

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• I like reading books about kids where there weren't really many adults, where they didn't need an adult to come and solve the problems for them. They could use their own ingenuity, use their own talents to solve whatever the issue was. And I like that still. I think that children want to read about heroic children. They don't want to read about children that have to be saved all the time.

  John Boyne

  Children, Book, Reading

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• I'm definitely good. I'm not bad; I'm extremely honest, and I allow no bullshit to pass by my radar. And that will always get lots of people thinking you're a jerk. But there are people who appreciate total honesty and questioning of the conformities in our society, and I'm heroic to those people. And I should be. It's an indictment of the rest of society who doesn't get that.

  Bill Maher

  Honesty, Thinking, Bullshit

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Disease is surely one of the ways in which we are tried by life and offered the chance to be heroic. Though few of us will win Olympic gold medals or slay dragons, disease can be the spark or gift that allows many of us to live out our personal myths and become heroes.

  Bernie Siegel

  Hero, Winning, Dragons

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• My fiction is almost always inspired by a character's need or desire to rise above him- or herself. No one is perfect and some of us have much adversity in our lives; it is those people who struggle to rise above their nature or background that I find the most interesting and heroic.

  Robert Crais

  Struggle, Character, Adversity

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• I admire people who re-create themselves. And it seems to me that what gives us all the opportunity to be heroic in our own lives is that we work to heal ourselves and be better than we were yesterday.

  Robert Crais

  Opportunity, Yesterday, People

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• Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

  Charlaine Harris

  Character

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• These, then, are the four kinds of royalty. First the monarchy of the heroic ages; this was exercised over voluntary subjects, but limited to certain functions; the king was a general and a judge, and had the control of religion The second is that of the barbarians, which is a hereditary despotic government in accordance with law. A third is the power of the so-called Aesynmete or Dictator; this is an elective tyranny. The fourth is the Lacedaemonian, which is in fact a generalship, hereditary and perpetual.

  Aristotle

  Kings, Government, Law

  Aristotle (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Aristotle (Illustrated)”, p.3028, Delphi Classics

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• Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

  Teju Cole

  Hero, Mean, Self

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