“All actual heroes are essential men,
And all men possible heroes.”

Interview with Barbara Walters (15 March 1991); also quoted in his memoir It Doesn't Take a Hero : General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Autobiography (1992), p. xiii

As quoted in "A Tribute to Yip Harburg: The Man Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz" at Democracy Now (25 November 2004) http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/25/a_tribute_to_yip_harburg_the.
Context: Lives of great men all remind us greatness takes no easy way.
All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.
Socrates and Galileo, John Brown, Thoreau, Christ, and Debs
Heard the night cry down with traitors, and the dawn shout "Up the reds!"

Source: "Simu Liu, the Asian Marvel superhero emerging at a critical time" in NBC Asian America (2 June 2021) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/simu-liu-asian-marvel-superhero-emerging-critical-time-rcna1071

Source: "Vice Adm. John D. Bulkeley, 84, Hero of D-Day and Philippines" in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/08/us/vice-adm-john-d-bulkeley-84-hero-of-d-day-and-philippines.html (8 April 1996)

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity
Context: Transport yourselves into the early childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light of our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a great sunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to think, to be! Wonder, hope; infinite radiance of hope and wonder, as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of these strong men! Strong sons of Nature; and here was not only a wild Captain and Fighter; discerning with his wild flashing eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart daring and doing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, Prophet, great devout Thinker and Inventor,—as the truly Great Man ever is. A Hero is a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all. This Odin, in his rude semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. A great heart laid open to take in this great Universe, and man's Life here, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, in his own rude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. And now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others, what must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, have made of him!

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book I. Preparation and Departure, Lines 547–549 (tr. R. C. Seaton)

Otto von Habsburg, quoted in The Independent, Sunday 17 October 2010
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As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.
"Busybody," review of Silkwood (1984-01-09), p. 107.
State of the Art (1985)