The War Hero Quotes

#1. He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying,

Richard Flanagan

#2. There's no blade sharper than the truth under the Sun, it's enlightens the mind, releases the captives, condemns the guilty and spares the innocent; it's the only weapon a hero ever needs to fight a war, the one which is conducted without a need of any Iron blade!

Marcus L. Lukusa

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I wanted something that would address the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. I wanted a story that could move readers. My Honor Flight is that story.

Dan McCurrigan

#6. 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

#7. Maybe it was time to cut the strings of everyone's expectations and free-fall for once in her life

Miranda Liasson

#8. You will NEVER be just a guy, Rome. You're the best brother a guy could have. You're a fucking hero. No one, and I mean no one, has ever had my back the way you have. You are an incredible person, be it in the army fighting a war or sitting on the goddamn couch watching the game. Don't forget it.

Jay Crownover

#9. Yet reason frowns in war's unequal game,
Where wasted nations raise a single name;
And mortgag'd states their grandsire's wreaths regret,
From age to age in everlasting debt;
Wreaths which at last the dear-bought right convey
To rust on medals, or on stones decay.

Samuel Johnson

#10. Battle is the soldier's vital breath! Peace turns him into a stooping asthmatic. War makes him a whole man again, and gives him the heart, strength, and vigor of a hero.

Charles Studd

#11. Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.

Karl Marx

#12. Letti wasn't born to pass through the world. She had been born to sit atop of it.

S.R. Crawford

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. George H. W. Bush may be a World War II hero and New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.

Christopher Buckley

#16. The Democrats are all over this. Democratic strategists feel John Kerry's war record means he can beat Bush. They say when it comes down to it voters will always vote for a war hero over someone who tried to get out of the war. I'll be sure to mention that to Bob Dole when I see him.

Jay Leno

#17. Pizza makes you a hero in the eyes of your kids. "Daddy got pizza!" You are higher status walking in the door with a pizza than if you were returning from a war with a Purple Heart.

Jim Gaffigan

#18. I have gone through so many examinations of what a hero is, between the World War II stuff and the astronaut stuff.

Tom Hanks

#19. 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

#20. Odysseus was a great hero in the Trojan War. When he left Troy to sail home to Ithaca, he was lost at sea for ten years. He begged the brave and mighty Zeus for help, and kindly Zeus sent winds to take him home.

Kate McMullan

#21. The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand.

Russell Baker

#22. 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

#23. He who gives back at first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs success, has never been, is not, and never will be, a hero in love, war or business. - Frederick Tudor

Gavin Weightman

#24. Don't be a hero. Leave that to them that started the war - the upper classes, the Conservatives, the officers.

Ken Follett

#25. 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

#26. It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong.

Cass Sunstein

#27. He'd never be the kind of man she deserved, whole and strong, not physically and mentally crippled.

Miranda Liasson

#28. 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

#29. He who gives back at the first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs of success has never been, is not, and never will be a hero in war, love, or business.

Frederic Tudor

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Eisenhower was my war hero and the President I admire and respect most.

Ethel Merman

#33. Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#34. 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

#35. The sun rises in the east every morning and falls in the west, Ayden. Darknesses are awaken and fate is tested, destinies are foreseen. Thy soul the only enemy, a hero is born. A new light rises once again ...

Nadege Richards

#36. Grant made the perfect candidate, a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues.

H.W. Brands

#37. War! war! war!
Heaven aid the right!
God move the hero's arm in the fearful fight!
God send the women sleep in the long, long night,
When the breasts on whose strength they leaned shall heave no more.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

#38. That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.

Steve Erickson

#39. Sgt. Basilone in his personal humility and unwavering dedication to the men who served with him, became a true hero of the American people during World War II.

Jim Proser

#40. 'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.

Annalee Newitz

#41. The fear of God makes a hero; the fear of man makes a coward.

Alvin C. York

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. I have returned many times to honour the valiant men who died ... every man who set foot on Omaha Beach was a hero.

Omar N. Bradley

#45. I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage.

Gillian Flynn

#46. The war had changed him, inside and out, in ways he could never have fathomed.

Miranda Liasson

#47. As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.

Maggie Stiefvater

#48. In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible war.

Michael Chabon

#49. 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

#50. Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle
before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime ... exempt[ion] ... from responsibility for what you do thereafter.

Thomas Sowell

#51. If now we were livingin the Revolutionary War and George Washington he being arrested through Britain. For sure he, they would consider him enemy combatant. But American, they consider him as hero.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

#52. If there was anything the last year had taught her - if there was anything Caleb had taught her, the Metigen War had taught her - it was that perspective was everything.

If you wanted to understand your enemy, you must understand that they were the hero in their own story.

G.S. Jennsen

#53. 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

#54. Lady, I have never been a hero, no Ryam Redwyne or Barristan the Bold. I've won no tourneys, no renown in war ... but I was a knight once, and you have helped me remember what that meant. My life is a poor thing, but it is yours.

George R R Martin

#55. 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

#56. Would you believe in a story without the heroes? There are stories without heroes.

Pushpa Rana

#57. 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

#58. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.

Slavoj Zizek

#59. 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

#60. Hero," he said softly, in a manner that was much like his father's. "Vengeance and glory are the ways of the Greeks and the Trojans. We are of the Herdsmen.

Sulari Gentill

#61. Some write a narrative of wars and feats, Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history.

William Cowper

#62. ... If one who slays one is a murderer then he who slays a thousand is not a hero,' said Lalu.
- Pg. #112, Across the Black Waters.

Mullk Raj Anand

#63. 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

#64. Being a hero is the easiest way to meet a bullet with your name on it.

David Kendall

#65. The bad thing caught you.
I've never retreated in my life. I've never backed away from a fight and I've never cowered in fear. Ever. That's not who I am. But I've been in combat long enough to know that when something unbeatable chases you, you do the only thing you can do.
You run. - Gabe

Courtney Cole

#66. 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

#67. He was, albeit only briefly, the hero of the world's hopes.

David Cannadine

#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. One day my grandson said to me, grandpa were you a hero in the war? And i said to him no I'm not a hero, but I have served in a company full of them.

Dick Winters

#70. I think every teenager is a hero. When we are young we feel so much pain. Go to school is like going to war, people let you down all the time. Sometimes it's very, very difficult to stay strong, but you have to.

Angelina Jolie

#71. The atrocities of war are only overshadowed by the heroism of their dead.

Todd Stocker

#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. 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

#74. I'm not a hero but I can end the war

Sally Green

#75. 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

#76. When I was 6 my father went to fight in the war, so he was my big hero. I thought he was the greatest thing.

Michael Caine

#77. In the world of so-called villains, what we need is not another hero. What we need is to stop the influx of people who dress themselves as menaces and proceed to harm others.

Vironika Tugaleva