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...

What I love about Indiana Jones is he always bites off slightly more than he can chew. The guy he's fighting is always slightly tougher than he is, but he just refuses to give up. And that's what...

Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Be real. I'm going up against three of the world's most vicious ubervillains. I have a very, very slim chance of survival. I have a better chance of winning the lottery, and I don't even play.

You marvel and applaud big heroes in their big heroic actions, and forget you are a hero in your humble life and have modest heroic actions to complete yourself.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one's cues.

Brandon's greatest regret is that he has but one life to give for Gondor.

A brigand, a barber, a beggar, two orphans, and a boy whore. With such do we defend the realms of men.

The woman, as small as she was, standing valiantly in the face of the threat the Saldi enforcers presented, sent heat rushing through his veins.

That is why your sacrifice was all the more difficult. You chose to be a hero not through enchantment but through your own manhood.

Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to...

And he smote the Balrog upon the mountainside.

Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life.

Heroes did not always swoop in to rescue. They made questionable calls. They lived with doubts. They replayed and edited and imagined different outcomes. They killed, sometimes, to save.

Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or...