Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.

A man must be willing to die for justice. Death is an inescapable reality and men die daily, but good deeds live forever.

Courage is the most important of the virtues because it is the one that makes all the others possible.

Civic courage is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

It is much easier to be a hero than a gentleman.

When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism.

A hero is a man who does what he can.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die.

It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

Any man and woman, and I've been on the record, any man or woman who wears the uniform and serves this country is a hero. I've said that repeatedly at all the town halls I've had.

The law of sacrifice is uniform throughout the world. To be effective it demands the sacrifice of the bravest and the most spotless.

I am not a hero.

Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.

These manly sentiments, in private life, make good citizens; in public life, the patriot and the hero.

You shall hear a good account of me or of my death.

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.

A hero holds purposes appropriate to man and is, therefore, a thinker.

No one is worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause.

If I were the blushing kind, I would blush to be called a hero.

I love the name of honor, more than I fear death.