“A static hero is a public liability. Progress grows out of motion.”

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Address at a meeting of the Berkeley Lyceum, New York, November 23, 1900. Quoted in Mark Twain's Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 146 http://books.google.com/books?id=7etXZ5Q17ngC&pg=PA146 (The speech is titled "Public Education Association" in that book, but also referred to elsewhere as his "I am a Boxer" speech.)

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 263)

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: The concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress, to the belief that social ills can be solved by social legislating, for it sees a country as all-but-trapped in its character until it has a hero who reveals the character of the country to itself.

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 20, The Metaphysical Crossbeak (p. 289)

Source: A General View of Positivism (1848, 1856), p. 153

Henry W. Levy, "Professor to Cure Scenarios with Wrong Emotional Content: Dabbled in Movies While at Harvard; Now Sought By Hollywood with Offer of Favorable Contract", New York University News January 1929; Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), p. 137.

Source: An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966), Chapter XI, Dynamic Analysis, p. 95