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

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

Source: &quot;Vice Adm. John D. Bulkeley, 84, Hero of D-Day and Philippines&quot; 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)