Emil Zatopek Quotes

You don't send a man to his death because you want a hero.

The real heroes were my good buddies who died during the battles.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

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

It is a sweet and glorious thing to die for one's country. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Send me six hundred men who know how to die

Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Young people are so brave when they go to fight.

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

The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.

To die for one's country is such a worthy fate that all compete for so beautiful a death.

I am not a hero but the brave men who died deserved this honor.

Part of the American dream is to live long and die young. Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live.

The men and women who serve in our military have won for us every hour we live in freedom, sometimes at the expense of the very hours of the lifetimes they had hoped to live.

If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity.

A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many owed so much to so few,' - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not.

Colonel, I do not care to die, but I pray to God I may never leave this field.

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country.

Here's to the red of it, There's not a thread of it, No, not a shred of it, In all the spread of it, From foot to head, But heroes bled for it, Faced steel and lead for it, Precious blood shed for it, Bathing in red.