Top 84 Quotes About War Heroes
#1. It's an old and honored tradition for war heroes to be promoted to important offices, whether or not they're suited to it
Christie Golden
#2. I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.
Norman Mailer
#3. Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?
Anne Frank
#4. The Ice Nation is a pretty brutal place. They breed war heroes. The relationship between mother and child, in that world, is a little bit different than it is in our own society. But, no one really likes being a disappointment to their parents and their family.
Zach McGowan
#5. If we take a small step in extolling peacemakers as much as honoring war heroes, we will be making a giant leap towards peace.
Newton Lee
#6. I saw some war heroes ... John Kerry is not a war hero. He couldn't tie the shoes of some of the people in Coastal Division 11.
John O'Neill
#7. The men history declares heroes are merely heroes because they failed to survive their benevolent acts.
Felix O. Hartmann
#8. People try to glorify war, particularly those who aren't actually fighting in them. People tend to make heroes of those who are fighting in them.
John Boyne
#9. In the wake of the Communist victory in 1949 and the CCP's subsequent decades of lavish self-praise as heroes of the anti-Japanese resistance, the Nationalist war effort has often been overlooked and denigrated.31
Andrew G. Walder
#10. I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
Oliver North
#11. But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings should not play at. Nations would do well To extort their truncheons from the puny hands Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world.
William Cowper
#12. This is where people misunderstand war. When you attack another country for its resources, you are the pirate. But when you protect your country from the pirates, you are the hero.
Suzy Kassem
#13. We are all proud of is World War II where we went in, we were decisive, we came to the conclusion that freedom prevailed, and we were heroes.
John F. Kerry
#14. What we dedicate today is not a memorial to war, rather it's a tribute to the physical and moral courage that makes heroes out of farm and city boys and that inspires Americans in every generation to lay down their lives for people they will never meet, for ideals that make life itself worth living.
Bob Dole
#15. Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story
the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.
Hugh Howey
#16. I absolutely hate the way the United States glorifies its military and its wars. Real heroes fight for peace.
Michel Templet
#17. If we must have heroes and wars whereinto make them, there is no war so brilliant as a war with the wrong, no hero so fit to be sung, as he who has gained the bloodless VICTORY of truth and mercy.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
#18. We're a nation of celebrity and hero worshipers, so much so that we make heroes out of those who aren't, such as John Wayne: a patriotic, red-blooded, two-fisted American who spent the Second World War in the trenches on the movie lots of Hollywood.
Vincent Bugliosi
#19. Some write a narrative of wars and feats, Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history.
William Cowper
#20. Spielberg's film portrays Oscar as a hero of this century. That is not true. Neither he nor I were heroes. We were just what we were able to be. In war we are all souls without a destiny,
Emilie Schindler
#21. I wondered if there were planets where it's okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes.
Ryu Murakami
#22. They are heroes, our soldiers, the men and women who go into harm's way to protect us, our way of life. It doesn't matter what you think of the war, your have to be grateful to the warriors, of whom we ask so much. To whom we sometimes give too little.
Kristin Hannah
#24. We are scattered, stunned; the remnant of heart left alive is filled with brotherly hate ... Whose fault? Everybody blamed somebody else. Only the dead heroes left stiff and stark on the battlefield escape.
Mary Boykin Chesnut
#25. I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.
Alice Oswald
#26. Many a man looking death, or simply compromise, in the face has been spared the label coward because his faith was bolstered by the memory of heroes who walked before him.
Doug Phillips
#27. I got very spoiled. Everybody said you will never ever work on such a good movie, you know. I did, because I went on to work on Captain America, which also has a great director, which is Joe Johnston, one of my heroes who designed the old Star Wars movies.
Daniel Simon
#28. No war is ever glorious. Heroes are usually dead. Besides, they rarely turn into heroes because they are super-humans, but because of circumstances.
Aleksandr Voinov
#29. We choose and make our heroes from what we have read, heard and believed in.
Pushpa Rana
#30. I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.
Gore Vidal
#31. I don't like the word "hero." There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won't be able to.
Svetlana Alexievich
#32. Never say war insane at the moment for you to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.
Auliq Ice
#33. Every war has its martyrs - the unsung heroes who sometimes don't even know the rationale behind the war they are fighting. They fight because they are trained to, kill because they are told to and die because they are destined to.
Anurag Shourie
#34. We were king's men, knights, and heroes ... but some knights are dark and full of terror, my lady. War makes monsters of us all."
"Are you saying you are monsters?"
"I am saying we are human. You are not the only one with wounds, Lady Brienne
George R R Martin
#35. Where are the heroes and the saints, who keep a clear vision of man's greatest gift, his freedom, to oppose not only the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family, and of the indigent, and claims our young for war?
Dorothy Day
#36. Without war there are no heroes."
"What harm would that be?"
"Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#37. Each time a new disaster puts miners in the news, the press tries to make them into heroes, but they don't quite fit the bill. They don't march off to war or rush into burning buildings or rid our streets of crime.
Tawni O'Dell
#38. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!
Helen Keller
#39. We be warriors in this war of life
Forging battle-knives as we fight
Never-ceasing to sharpen the dull blades
Our own Heroes in not so shining armour'"
-Lost Voyagers-
Chamindra Warusawitharane
#40. John Smith: Mankind doesn't need warfare and bloodshed to prove itself. Everyday life can provide honour and valour. Let's hope that from now on this country can find its heroes in smaller places. In the most ordinary of deeds.
Paul Cornell
#41. In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?'
No,'" I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#42. Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#43. As we take stock on the morrow of victory, we shall find that nothing of real value to the human race has been destroyed. Our dead heroes will have won immortality. Civilisation will have gained new vitality. Humanity will have entered upon a richer heritage.
Horatio Bottomley
#44. What's the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?
Joe Abercrombie
#45. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.
H.W. Brands
#46. War is not a means but an end. It makes violence respectable and makes sadists look like heroes.
Mary Horlock
#47. The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.
Anthony Minghella
#48. There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes.
(King Pelles the Sure)
Peter S. Beagle
#49. Do I understand, sir, that you mean the Cause for which our heroes have died is not sacred?'
If you were run over by a railroad train your death wouldn't sanctify the railroad company, would it?' asked Rhett and his voice sounded as if he were humbly seeking information.
Margaret Mitchell
#50. Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.
John Colville
#51. For heroes do not make history - that is the historian's job - but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#52. Growing old is an unwinnable campaign. During this war we witness ugly scenes. Truths mutate to whims. Faith becomes cynical transactions between liars. Sacrifices turn out to be needless excesses. Heroes become old farts, and young farts become heroes. Ethics become logos on sports clothing.
David Mitchell
#53. It grey louder. Louder. They were singing, singing at the top of their lungs. Andrius joined, and then my brother and the gray-haired man. And finally, the bald man joined in, singing out national anthem. 'Lithuania, land of heroes...
Ruta Sepetys
#54. Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable. Disposable in war; disposable in work. We need warriors and volunteer firefighters, so we label these men heroes.
Warren Farrell
#55. The young man looked down from the cart at the people in front of him. Jonah felt his teacher's eyes meet his own, and for a fraction of a second a smile played on the prisoner's lips. Then he glanced toward heaven and spoke. I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
Anna Myers
#56. For as long as this nation has known war, we have embraced the heroes it has produced. Americans have rightfully noted the honor and nobility of courage under hostile fire and thanked those who perished in their defense.
James T. Walsh
#57. In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
H.L. Mencken
#58. War doesn't have heroes, it only has the men who lost so many things in their life that they just keep going and do the most unthinkable things, just because they don't care anymore.
Wouter Van Gastel
#59. The casualties of war are true heroes that everybody forgets to remember, even those who fight wars within themselves ...
Michelle Horst
#60. Garahel always used to say that heroism was just another word for horror, and maybe a worse one. A hero always feels that he has to do what's right. Sometimes that leads to tormenting himself with doubt long after the deed is done.
Liane Merciel
#61. It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.
Chris Hayes
#62. Would you believe in a story without the heroes? There are stories without heroes.
Pushpa Rana
#63. In 1940 I was just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight and become heroes.
Woody Allen
#64. Good night, then - sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly on all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn.
Winston Churchill
#65. I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day when he said, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said 'No ... but I served in a company of heroes.'
Richard Winters
#66. I'm just a kid, Chiron," I said miserably. "What good is one lousy hero against something like Kronos?"
Chiron managed a smile. '"What good is one lousy hero'? Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain said something like that to me once, just before he single-handedly changed the course of your Civil War.
Rick Riordan
#67. Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
Walt Whitman
#68. As each brigade emerged from the woods, from 50 to 100 guns opened upon it, tearing great gaps in its ranks; but the heroes pressed on and were shot down by reserves at the guns. It was not war, it was murder.
Daniel Harvey Hill
#69. The real heroes are those ones who are forgotten, forsaken and remain the nameless ones, in the history of time.
Auliq Ice
#70. I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.
Steven Spielberg
#71. They passed a succession of granite monuments to the conquering magicians of the late Victorian age and the fallen heroes of the Great War, then a few monolithic sculptures representing Ideal Virtues (Patriotism, Respect for Authority, the Dutiful Wife).
Jonathan Stroud
#72. No one has done more to prevent conflict - no one has made a greater sacrifice for the cause for Peace - than you, America's proud missile submarine family. You stand tall among our heroes of the Cold War.
Colin Powell
#73. It was "Boom Boom" Dupont who had ripped Kit out of the Humvee after the IED went off, the IED that turned the entire undercarriage of his truck into a fiery wall that consumed the five men inside.
Siobhan Fallon
#74. May therefore God give us the strength to continue to do our duty and with this prayer we bow in homage before our dead heroes, before those whom they have left behind in bereavement, and before all the other victims of this war.
Adolf Hitler
#75. Nothing glamorous like the write-ups in the papers or the newsreels. We weren't heroes. We were only there ...
Robert Cormier
#76. I have learned from first hand experience that war is the destroyer of everything that is good in the world, it turns our young into soulless killers and we tell them that they are heroes when they master the 'art' of killing.
Kevin Benderman
#77. While you live, whatever your state while on earth, act the generous and manly part; and never, never, either manually or with the lash of satire, war with the weak
T.J. Llewelyn Prichard
#78. War, in some ways, is merciful to men. It makes them heroes if they are the victors. If they are the vanquished - they do not live to see their homes taken, their wives widowed. But if you are a woman - you must live through defeat...
Samhita Arni
#79. One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing
being a data bank
and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.
Peter Greenaway
#80. Zhukov was the most successful commander of World War II, who fell from grace under Khrushchev, but never lost his place in the pantheon of Soviet heroes.
Georgy Zhukov
#81. He never went to war, yet he emerged from the smog and shadows victorious.
Asghar Abbas
#82. The heroes of Flight 93 won the first battle in the War on Terror, and they should never be forgotten.
Jim Ramstad
#83. But the war proponents tried desperately to continue the glorification of war by praising anyone who had been sent off to war or even just put on a uniform. Troops and veterans were placed on pedestals as great heroes - warriors who had saved us from some imagined modern-day Hitler.
Ron Paul
#84. As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded, giving full reign to the fickle fortunes of war.
Charles Emmerson
