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We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look. (President Ronald Reagan)
A hero is a man who is afraid to run away. (English proverb)
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer. (Poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes. (Benjamin Disraeli)
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You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes. (Astronaut Walter M. Schirra, Sr.)
Without heroes, we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go. (Novelist Bernard Malamud)
Celebrities are people who make news, but heroes are people who make history. Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities. (Historian Daniel J. Boorstin)
The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat. (Writer Robert Louis Stevenson)
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. (Novelist Umberto Eco)
The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers. (Theologian and poet Johann Kaspar Lavater)
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive. (Poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine)
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(The photos in this section are of, from top to bottom, Neil Armstrong, Edith Cavell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Thor Heyerdahl, Audie Murphy, Harriet Tubman, and missionary William Carey.)