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"Normally a hero manifests his nature in action, for example, the swift, decisive deeds of Achilles. But Hamlet's chief characteristic throughout most of the play is his hesitation to act, which makes him appear unheroic in any conventional sense. The presence in the play of more conventionally heroic types such as Laertes and the Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, only serves to emphasise the oddity of Hamlet as a hero. But if he is problematic as a hero, the reason is that heroism itself has become deeply problematic in his world (though one hastens to add that because heroism has become problematic does not mean that it has disappeared)." Paul Cantor   "If the hero were really god-like, if he were exempt, as the gods are, from age and death, then he would not be a hero at all." Bernard Knox   "Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as such; some wise great Mohammed for one god-inspired, and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown in, that he might live thereby; this perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seems a still absurder phases of things! Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always that determines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole word will do and make. The world's manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world's general position. Looking well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have produced him, in which we ourselves live and work." Thomas Carlyle   "The hero is primarily, in most mythologies, the man whom nobody can destroy; but in Greece he was the man who had to destroy himself. The normal assumption, perhaps, would be that Achilles, with his superhuman strength and speed, his divine armor, his immortal horses, and the Pelian spear, would almost inevitably live to an advanced age. But it is precisely the opposite. The necessary condition (aisa, moira) of these supreme gifts is misery and an early death. Achilles is the saddest man at Troy. But his grief and death are not foreordained by an external fate; they are foreordained by that innermost quality known to Homer—arete. Achilles had his choice between long life and greatness; he chose greatness, and therefore was Achilles. His greatness, however, was a kind of continual spending of himself, and Achilles was already on his way to self-destruction long before he slew Hector. For the self-destructiveness of the hero hinges upon a certain excess, an ability to outdo not only everyone else, but especially himself, for whom be has no regard except as the receptacle of certain supreme standards. There are exceptions, of course, the most notable being the adroit Odysseus; but a surprising majority of Greek heroes stride grimly into ruin." Cedric Whitman   "As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning. The petty mail clerk, who ordinarily sorted letters early and late, who sorted constantly, who sorted from Monday until Saturday without interruption; the clerk, the cobbler, had suddenly achieved a romantic possibility in life: he could become a hero, and everyone who wore a uniform was already being cheered by the women, and greeted beforehand with this romantic appellation by those who had to remain behind. They acknowledged the unknown power which had lifted them out of their everyday existence." Stefan Zweig   "Novels show the overwhelming intricacy of things: contingencies eluding any pattern, idiosyncrasies baffling all psychological theories, and moral subtleties beyond the reach of any ideology. If the hero of a realist novel should embrace a theory as the key to ethics or politics, he is sure to find himself in a situation more complicated than his theory allows. He encounters what might be called the irony of outcomes, and the story of that encounter is the masterplot of ideological novels as different as Turgenev's Fathers and Children, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Conrad's The Secret Agent, and James's The Princess Casamassima. They all demonstrate the superiority of a fine discrimination of moral particulars not just to one but to any possible theory." Gary Saul Morson   "Oppenheimer was not ashamed of his work, even if, for PR reasons, he sometimes wanted to appear so. He 'continued for the rest of his life to be proud of his achievement,' Dyson wrote. And when a German playwright depicted him as a tragic hero who regretted his actions, he protested bitterly. The line from the Bhagavad Gita about death was a later amendment. Years earlier, he had quoted a different one: 'If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky,' he said, 'that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.' That does not sound like a man who feels remorse." Tom Chivers   "Try 'dunking' on people you're in a conversation with at a party. You're unlikely to find people gathering behind you, patting you on the back and applauding you like you're in a freestyle rap battle. But on social media, that's exactly what they'll do. The kind of antics that would make you look like a borderline psychopath at a restaurant, a bar, or in someone's living room make you look like a hero on Twitter." Leighton Woodhouse   "Is Joyce the one intellectual who atones for Nietzschean contempt of the masses, and raises mass man, or a representative of mass man, to the status of epic hero? To a degree, yes. One effect of Ulysses is to show that mass man matters, that he has an inner life as complex as an intellectual's, that it is worthwhile to record his personal details on a prodigious scale. And yet it is also true that Bloom himself would never and could never have read Ulysses or a book like Ulysses. The complexity of the novel, its avant-garde technique, its obscurity, rigorously exclude people like Bloom from its readership. More than almost any other twentieth-century novel, it is for intellectuals only." John Carey   "'Gallantry to the ladies,' we are told of the hero of the greatest and most typical of English novels, 'was among his principles of honour, and he held it as much incumbent on him to accept a challenge to love as if it had been a challenge to fight'; he heroically goes home for the night with a lady of title he meets at a masquerade, though at the time very much in love with the girl whom he eventually marries. The woman whose power lies only in her charms, and who is free to allow the burden of responsibility to fall on a man's shoulder, could lightly play the seducing part, and thereby exert independence and authority in the only shapes open to her. The man on his part, introducing the misplaced idea of 'honour' into the field from which the natural idea of responsibility has been banished, is prepared to descend at the lady's bidding into the arena, according to the old legend, and rescue the glove, even though he afterwards flings it contemptuously in her face." Havelock Ellis   "The idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite? With horrible political insight they found a way to disguise the thing. Intellectuals do not understand. They get their notions about matters like this from literature. They expect a wicked hero like Richard III. But do you think the Nazis didn't know what murder was? Everybody (except certain bluestockings) knows what murder is. That is very old human knowledge. The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. To defy that old understanding is not banality. There was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial." Saul Bellow   "Out of the oil-smooth spirit of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, suddenly, there arose a kindling fever. Nobody knew exactly what was on the way; nobody was able to say whether it was to be a new art, a new man, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society. So everybody made of it what he liked. But people were standing up on all sides to fight against the old way of life. Suddenly the right man was on the spot everywhere; and, what is so important, men of practical enterprise joined forces with the men of intellectual enterprise. Talents developed that had previously been choked or had taken no part at all in public life. They were as different from each other as anything well could be, and the contradictions in their aims were unsurpassable. The Superman was adored, and the Subman was adored; health and the sun were worshipped, and the delicacy of consumptive girls was worshipped; people were enthusiastic hero-worshippers and enthusiastic adherents of the social creed of the Man in the Street; one had faith and was skeptical, one was naturalistic and precious, robust and morbid; one dreamed of ancient castles and shady avenues, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, jewels, hashish, disease and demonism, but also of prairies, vast horizons, forges and rolling-mills, naked wrestlers, the uprisings of the slaves of toil, man and woman in the primeval Garden, and the destruction of society." Robert Musil   "Homer's Achilles is clearly the model for the tragic hero of the Sophoclean stage; his stubborn, passionate devotion to an ideal image of self is the same force that drives Antigone, Oedipus, Ajax and Philoctetes to the fulfillment of their destinies. Homer's Achilles is also, for archaic Greek society, the essence of the aristocratic ideal, the paragon of male beauty, courage and patrician manners—'the splendor running in the blood,' says Pindar, in a passage describing Achilles' education in the cave of the centaur Chiron. And this, too, strikes a tragic note, for Pindar sang his praise of aristocratic values in the century which saw them go down to extinction, replaced by the new spirit of Athenian democracy." Bernard Knox   "Originally, virtus meant courage in battle, but it came to include manly integrity in all spheres of life. Virtue was the inner strength necessary to overcome the 'slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,' as Shakespeare put it, and to forge one's own destiny. Virtue's emblem was Hercules, the hero and slayer of monsters whose physical strength enabled him to defy impossible odds. Hercules was by far the most popular god both in the ancient world and during the Renaissance, the hopeful symbol of the individual's ability to determine the direction of his own life against blind fate. In the Middle Ages, virtue took on Christian overtones and Fortune became identified with sin, the realm of corrupt flesh and the Devil. In the Renaissance, Machiavelli revived the opposition between Virtue and Fortune in pagan guise. As the author of The Prince explained, 'Fortune is a woman,' who requires a strong man to tame her and control her. For that reason, 'she is always well disposed toward younger men, since they are less cautious and more aggressive.'" Arthur Herman   "Each is in some way complicit in or responsible for her own suffering, though in different ways. The motives actuating Isabella are the most troubling of all: she mistakes Heathcliff for a 'hero of romance,' thereby suggesting the way female fantasy, perpetuated by romance conventions, renders women complicit in their own oppression. Wuthering Heights, of course, traffics in such conventions—above all in its problematically happy ending, which anticipates a satisfying marriage between a reformed, softened, domesticated, but still appealingly manly man, and the woman who domesticates him. At the same time, Isabella's rude awakening from her romantic fantasies, along with the other instances of infatuation and marriage being succeeded by disillusionment and suffering, provide a sustained critique of the romance novel. If Wuthering Heights has nevertheless become popularly known as one of the great romantic stories of English literature, that is because its critique of the genre is strongest in the parts of the novel that its popularizations are most likely to omit." Beth Newman   "Intimate conviction, needing support from nothing external, came to be seen as the true guide to political action. After the Napoleonic wars, a society of radical students, the Burschenschaft, was set up in the university of Jena to work for unity and democracy in Germany. One of its leaders preached that the righteous man recognizes no external law; once convinced that a course of action was right, he had unconditionally and uncompromisingly to realize the dictates of reason as revealed to him. Among the adepts this was known simply as 'the principle,' and those who followed it hence termed themselves the 'Unconditionals'; they took Jesus as their hero, for they considered him a martyr to conviction, and their association-song proclaimed: 'A Christ thou shalt become.' One of these students, Carl Sand, acquired the conviction that the writer, Kotzebue, was an enemy of the German people, and decided to kill him. Having done the deed, he left a paper by the side of his victim on which was inscribed: 'A Christ thou shalt become.' The inscription, of course, referred to Sand, not to his victim." Elie Kedourie   "Students of grammar are aware that in certain languages, among them Greek, there exists a verbal expression between the active and the passive voices which is known as the median or middle. At times this is a mere paradox of grammar, like the humorous quirks that occur in the assignment of nominal gender; at other times, it has a reflexive sense. But there is also a class of verbs in which a middle-ground exists. Consider dunamai, 'to be able.' What is ability? In one sense, it is something that is within us, that we hold passively. On the other hand, it is a type of potential energy, containing if not action at least the promise of action. It is within this unique middle-ground that we find tragic fate. The protagonist does what he does neither because he is forced to, nor because it is all his own idea. Vaster currents are moving. Conceivably he could avoid them. We can imagine—remotely—Achilles opting to return to his anonymous and lengthy life. But then he would not be Achilles. The decision that he makes becomes himself, becomes what he is. In this sense the elusive notion of fate is closer to the concept of character. It is reflected in the reciprocity between the tragic hero as individual and as leader of a nation or race. For although he may lean toward one pole or the other, there is never a completely defined dichotomy between the public and the private man. And this is what Hegel means by the world-historical individual." David Lenson   "Goebbels proudly described it as a 'revolutionary fighting newspaper,' and in Der Angriff we can identify several distinctive features he contributed to Nazi journalism. The paper was written in an outspokenly aggressive manner, and although it was similar to existing Nazi papers in giving extensive coverage to Party activities and affairs, Goebbels, who wrote all the leading articles, also used a more direct, personal style to create a sense of embattled sympathy amongst Party 'fighters.' His most effective articles were written in the style of his diary, in a breathless first-person narrative. The front page of Der Angriff always carried a cartoon by Schweitzer, under the pseudonym 'Mjolnir' (a Norse word meaning 'Hammer of Thor' or 'Destroyer'), and these accentuated the ostentatiously anti-Semitic tone of the paper. The first issue had a caricature of the Jewish banker Jakob Goldschmidt on the front page, and in his first leader Goebbels declared: 'Germany is an exploitation colony of international Jewish finance capital.' The second issue attacked several Jewish lawyers by name. Many subsequent issues had front-page leaders devoted to the 'Jewish question.' Der Angriff frequently carried hints of menace about how Jews and other opponents of Nazism might be treated in the future, not only in its leading articles. For example, the issue of 19 September 1927 carried a small piece describing how an SA man had been stabbed in Cottbus by a Jew. The article was sarcastically titled 'A Jewish knife hero,' and ended with the words: 'Nothing will be forgotten. Come the day!'" Toby Thacker   "There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with 'voluptuous' figures." Eric Blair   "Every culture exalts historical figures who have suffered for holding to their beliefs, resisting subordination, or opposing authority. A recurring theme in the epics of the Turkish novelist Yaşar Kemal is that of an outlaw whom peasants revere as a dauntless fighter against oppressive conditions that they themselves cannot resist. Likewise, the hero of a Hollywood Western is typically a free-willed man who stands apart from the crowd and refuses to accept injustice. A basic reason we consider uncompromising independence a heroic trait is that it is the exception in human history, not the rule. Another is that we all identify, at some level, with personal independence." Timur Kuran