Mark Zuckerberg will be a hero to many young entrepreneurs 20 years from now. Bill Gates will be a hero to others, and they will look to those [people] like I read books when I was in my teens about Rockefeller or Carnegie.
... it is a welcome symptom in an age which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that it makes heroes of men whose goals lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere.
The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.
To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.
A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.
Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.
MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
Here is a hero who did nothing but shake the tree as soon as the fruit was ripe. Does this seem to be too small a thing to you? Then take a good look at the tree he shook.
John Barleycorn was a hero bold, Of noble enterprise, For if you do but taste his blood, 'Twill make your courage rise, Twill make a man forget his wo; 'Twill heighten all his joy.