Heroic Women Quotes

I want to do something splendid...something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.

My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.

Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O Never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.

And you know what makes me super mad? If a guy has scars, it's like some heroic shit show or something. But women? We're just creepy freaks.

Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor - the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typically associate courage with heroic and brave deeds. But in my opinion, this definition fails to recognize the inner strength and level of commitment required for us to actually speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences -- good and bad. Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as "ordinary courage.

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle--something heroic, or wonderful--that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous; that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.

...most men and women will yield to the strong currents sucking them into the seas of ruin. Only the strongest in mind and spirit will swim against that current.

When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

This is stupid." "Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You think in war it must be different. Must be better. With death around the corner, men united against hardship, the cunning of the enemy, people must think harder, faster, be...better. Be heroic. Only it's just the same. In fact do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it's worse. There aren't many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they'll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There's no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.

Wanderess, Wanderess, weave us a story of seduction and ruse. Heroic be the Wanderess, the world be her muse.

Our young people think about nothing more than love affairs and pleasure. They spend more time attempting to seduce and dishonor young women than in thinking about their country's welfare. Our women, in order to take care of the house and family of God, forget their own. Our men limit their activities to vice and their heroics to shameful acts. Children wake up in a fog of routine, adolescents live out their best years without ideals, and their elders are sterile, and only serve to corrupt our young people by their example.

By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can’t do magic. The ones who don’t have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.

Men can have an obvious display of heroics or strength or accomplishment, but it is the unsung women throughout all ages of humankind who have endured with superlative strength, beauty and love, often with secret suffering, that deserve absolute respect and acknowlegement. They are the true heroes of humanity. They are the champions who have birthed and nurtured us, who have held us together at the most integral level, when men seemed intent only on tearing apart the fabric of life for irrelevant ideals.

The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women's heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love.

Heroic," Crane told Baines contemptuously. "Old women, idiot children, bound men, you'll take on all comers. There's a three-legged stray dog hangs around the lanes here. Perhaps someday you could work up to kicking that.

A real man would never cry in public unless he was watching a movie in which a heroic dog died to save its master.Or if Heidi klum unbuttoned her blouse. Or he accidently dropped a full case of beer.

Women were different from men in such matters. Was it that they were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less romantic ; or were they more heroic?

If I must share my story, I want to do so on my terms, without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave or heroic. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived. It could have been worse, so much worse. That’s

Hey, have you heard about the time I saved Huio from being swallowed? Oh yes. He was going to get eaten. By a monster uglier than the women he courts. And I flew into the thing’s mouth to save him. Off the tongue. Then I was very humble about having done such a heroic deed.

I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind, and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women [...]: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

A hero: a man or woman who is unsatisfied by his condition, and resolves to do something about it.

I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But now I think -- it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet?

It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they don't explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable - Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.

The Bible speaks of the Word of God as added. Sometimes it's planted by the wayside, and nothing grows there. Sometimes it's sown among the thorns and represents the person who makes the decision an then goes back to his old life of bars and chasing women or whatever. A third seed is sown among the rocks. There's sand and dirt between the rocks, and when it rains you'll see a stalk of green coming up. But on the first day with sunshine it wilts because there is no room for roots. The fourth seed is planted on fertile soil, and finally it takes hold and has a chance to grow and live. That's what happened to me.

John Quincy Adams subscribed to the thesis that his mother's generation was unique when he complained to [his wife] that there were no modern women like her. Abigail, God love her, shot back that women might act frivolous and flighty, but only because men wanted them to.

Our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

so many women having taken the hero’s journey, only to find it personally empty and dangerous for humanity. Women emulated the male heroic journey because there were no other images to emulate;

What did I learn that day in the sabha? All this time I'd believed in my power over my husbands. I'd believed that because they loved me they would do anything for me. But now I saw that though they did love me—as much perhaps as any man can love—there were other things they loved more. Their notions of honor, of loyalty toward each other, of reputation were more important to them than my suffering. They would avenge me later, yes, but only when they felt the circumstances would bring them heroic fame. A woman doesn't think that way. I would have thrown myself forward to save them if it had been in my power that day. I wouldn't have cared what anyone thought. The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as much from them as from our enemies

Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for—ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s sake—for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes. But she, who knew little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes. She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her. She stumbled and halted in her utterance. The thread of argument slipped from her. He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.

The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren’t so deeply tragic.

Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it - donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment's notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group.

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren’t about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.

Right. Fantastic. Now I'm supposed to do something heroic, right?" "Please. For one thing, you're not the type. Second, I am tired of women and men of destiny. The idea of a singular hero and a manifest destiny just makes us all lazy. There is no destiny. There is choice, there is action, and any other narrative perpetuates a myth that someone else out there will fix our problems with a magic sword and a blessing from the gods.

But I am a knight of the Round Table," he protested, weakly. "I am a protector of the realm, a slayer of evil, I defeat all those who raise their swords in opposition to Arthur, King of all Britain." "Trust me, kid, women prefer a man who can cook.

The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.

In order to have a happy ending, in order to be triumphant, in order to be heroic, you have to tell your own story. The women's movement knows that; black people know that; brown people know that; yellow people know that. You have to be able to tell your own story in order to show that you are worthy--that you belong.

Why had it never occurred to Frankie that a girl, a woman, could have a place on her father’s office wall for doing something heroic or important, that a woman could invent something or discover something or be a nurse on the battlefield, could literally save lives?

Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.

was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.

I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it, and mean o astonish you all some day.

Active or ambitious women were not only rare but often evil. Wonder Woman flipped this paradigm by embodying the strength, assertiveness, and independence usually associated with bad girls and villains in a positive heroic light. The Golden Age Wonder Woman was a blatant rejection of the good girl/bad girl binary and even offered a critique of the good girl role.

For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men, and the myths of women—these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort.

PRAISE FOR 'THE JOURNEY HOME' Many saints are known and praised by all. We pray to them in litanies and celebrate their feast days. But the vast majority of holy men and women live heroic lives quietly before God. Loyal to family, lovers of God, servants in the Church, these unsung saints live everyday life as an example for us. David Hanneman is one such man. His story is exemplary and should be told to the world. He not only lived a noble life, but also suffered with heroism and grace as he passed into glory. This is a story to encourage and bless us all. We are thankful to Joseph Hanneman for sharing his father and making his story known to us who need such examples to encourage us as we face the difficulties and challenges of life.

Now, somewhere over that wide blue sea, Theseus lolled with impunity on royal couches, admired by all for his bravery, his noble and heroic exploits—and like a thousand women before me, I would pay the price of what we had done together.

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.

I don't like categorizing stuff, but women's roles all through history have been to act as hierophant or someone who's guarded the secrets or guarded the temple. I'm a girl doing what guys usually did, the way that I look, the goals and kinds of things I want to help achieve through rock. It's more heroic stuff and heroic stuff has been traditionally male. Like Hendrix and Jim Morrison and all those people. I mean, Jim Morrison was trying to elevate the word; he was the poet in rock & roll before me. He was an academic poet. Lou Reed -- another academic poet. I'm more like down-to-earth than them guys

It is quite edifying to hear women speculate upon the worthlessness and the duration of beauty. But though virtue is a much finer thing, and those hapless creatures who suffer under the misfortune of good looks ought to be continually put in mind of the fate which awaits them; and though, very likely, the heroic female character which ladies admire is a more glorious and beautiful object than the kind, fresh, smiling, artless, tender little domestic goddess, whom men are inclined to worship—yet the latter and inferior sort of women must have this consolation—that the men do admire them after all; and that, in spite of all our kind friends' warnings and protests, we go on in our desperate error and folly,

The legends of heroic men protecting helpless women turn out to be lies and, worse, propaganda intended to encourage women to embrace their helplessness.

Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.

As children, because of our dependency, we experience a sense of being powerless in a world of powerful people. If our home environments are unpleasant or painful, we defend ourselves by secretly promising ourselves that when we grow up we will do things better than our parents did. However, because we know only what we learned as children, as adults we continue to seek out experiences and relationships that offer the comfort of familiarity. So, despite our heroic promises to do things differently, we often end up duplicating our childhood situations and relationships.

FROM A CONVERSATION WITH THE CENSOR—Who will go to fight after such books? You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism. Heroic women. You dethrone them. You make them into ordinary women, females. But our women are saints.—Our heroism is sterile, it leaves no room for physiology or biology. It’s not believable. War tested not only the spirit but the body, too. The material shell.

If I could let you know - two women together is a work nothing in civilization ha made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine - look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

If I must share my story , I want to do so on my terms , without the attention that inevitably follows . I do not want pity or appreciation or advice . I am not brave or heroic . I am not strong . I am not special . I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced . I am a victim who survived .

The "fashion-beauty complex'," representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as "central producers and regulators of 'femininity'" (1990, p. 39). The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, "glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence'' but in fact its aim is to "depreciate woman's body and deal a blow to her narcissism'' so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires "either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it'' (p. 39).

Are you saying I should run after her?” “Crawl, actually, if I were you,” recommended Aral. “Crawl fast. Slither under her door, go belly-up, let her stomp on you till she gets it out of her system. Then apologize some more. You may yet save the situation.” Aral’s eyes were openly alight with amusement now. “What do you call that? Total surrender?” said Kou indignantly. “No. I’d call it winning.” His voice grew a shade cooler. “I’ve seen the war between men and women descend to scorched-earth heroics. Pyres of pride. You don’t want to go down that road. I guarantee it.

While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told. “I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.

Brave young women complete heroic acts everyday, with no one bearing witness. This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story the made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet feats of courage. And to introduce them to the young women like Kamila Sidiqi who will go on. No matter what.

Adrienne Rich had it right. No one gives a crap about motherhood unless they can profit off it. Women are expendable and the work of childbearing, done fully, done consciously, is all-consuming. So who’s gonna write about it if everyone doing it is lost forever within it? You want adventures, you want poetry and art, you want to salon it up over at Gertrude and Alice’s, you’d best leave the messy all-consuming baby stuff to someone else. Birthing and nursing and rocking and distracting and socializing and cooking and washing and gardening and mending: what’s that compared with bullets whizzing overhead, dazzling destructive heroics, headlines, parties,

The table was prettily decorated with camellias from the orangery, and upon the snow-white tablecloth, amongst the clear crystal glasses, the old green wineglasses threw delicate little shadows, like the spirit of a pine forest in summer. The Prioress had on a grey taffeta frock with a very rare lace, a white lace cap with streamers, and her old diamond eardrops and brooches. The heroic strength of soul of old women, Boris thought, who with great taste and trouble make themselves beautiful - more beautiful, perhaps, than they have ever been as young women - and who still can hold no hope of awakening any desire in the hearts of men, is like a righteous man working at his good deeds even after he has abandoned his faith in a heavenly reward.

Why isn't every woman a feminist? Feminism tells a tale of female injury, but the average woman in heterosexual intimacy knows that men are injured too, as indeed they are. She may be willing to grant, this average woman, that men in general have more power than women in general. This undoubted fact is merely a fact; it is abstract, while the man of flesh and blood who stands before her is concrete: His hurts are real, his fears palpable. And like those heroic doctors on the late show who work tirelessly through the epidemic even though they may be fainting from fatigue, the woman in intimacy may set her own needs to one side in order better to attend to his. She does this not because she is "chauvinized" or has "false consciousness," but because this is what the work requires. Indeed, she may even excuse the man's abuse of her, having glimpsed the great reservoir of pain and rage from which it issues. Here is a further gloss on the ethical disempowerment attendant upon women's caregiving: in such a situation, a woman may be tempted to collude in her own ill-treatment.

Credomancy may seek to exploit the human desire for a tidy narrative where an unblemished romantic hero vanquishes all obstacles, but such ideals have very little to with reality. Reality requites pragmatism and compromise. Men fail. Women fail. There are no heroes, only human beings who somehow find the strength to behave heroically, no matter how many times they have been unable to do so in the past. If you understand that, Miss Edwards - if you truly and deeply understand that, then you will understand the most powerful thing anyone with a heart can understand.” “And what’s that?” Emily said softly. “That love is not enough. But it’s a start.

It is not biology alone but heroism too that drives women to find the will and grit and creativity to put one’s own impulses aside to serve the needs of a tiny creature around the clock—especially in an environment in which that heroic choice is only casually acknowledged, much less honored, cherished, or assisted. I believe the myth about the ease and naturalness of mothering—the ideal of the effortlessly ever-giving mother—is propped up, polished, and promoted as a way to keep women from thinking clearly and negotiating forcefully about what they need from their partners and from society at large in order to mother well, without having to sacrifice themselves in the process.

What is so often said about the solders of the 20th century is that they fought to make us free. Which is a wonderful sentiment and one witch should evoke tremendous gratitude if in fact there was a shred of truth in that statement but, it's not true. It's not even close to true in fact it's the opposite of truth. There's this myth around that people believe that the way to honor deaths of so many of millions of people; that the way to honor is to say that we achieved some tangible, positive, good, out of their death's. That's how we are supposed to honor their deaths. We can try and rescue some positive and forward momentum of human progress, of human virtue from these hundreds of millions of death's but we don't do it by pretending that they'd died to set us free because we are less free; far less free now then we were before these slaughters began. These people did not die to set us free. They did not die fighting any enemy other than the ones that the previous deaths created. The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. Solders are paid killers, and I say this with a great degree of sympathy to young men and women who are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor is accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions. We create the possibility of moral choice by communicating truth about ethics to people. That to me is where real heroism and real respect for the dead lies. Real respect for the dead lies in exhuming the corpses and hearing what they would say if they could speak out; and they would say: If any ask us why we died tell it's because our fathers lied, tell them it's because we were told that charging up a hill and slaughtering our fellow man was heroic, noble, and honorable. But these hundreds of millions of ghosts encircled the world in agony, remorse will not be released from our collective unconscious until we lay the truth of their murders on the table and look at the horror that is the lie; that murder for money can be moral, that murder for prestige can be moral. These poor young men and woman propagandized into an undead ethical status lied to about what is noble, virtuous, courageous, honorable, decent, and good to the point that they're rolling hand grenades into children's rooms and the illusion that, that is going to make the world a better place. We have to stare this in the face if we want to remember why these people died. They did not die to set us free. They did not die to make the world a better place. They died because we are ruled by sociopaths. The only thing that can create a better world is the truth is the virtue is the honor and courage of standing up to the genocidal lies of mankind and calling them lies and ultimate corruptions. The trauma and horrors of this century of staggering bloodshed of the brief respite of the 19th century. This addiction to blood and the idea that if we pour more bodies into the hole of the mass graves of the 20th century, if we pour more bodies and more blood we can build some sort of cathedral to a better place but it doesn't happen. We can throw as many young men and woman as we want into this pit of slaughter and it will never be full. It will never do anything other than sink and recede further into the depths of hell. We can’t build a better world on bodies. We can’t build peace on blood. If we don't look back and see the army of the dead of the 20th century calling out for us to see that they died to enslave us. That whenever there was a war the government grew and grew. We are so addicted to this lie. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue. It drowns us, drowns our children, our future, and the world. When we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death; we follow it.

Women always have a little more strength than they believe, even when lying on the ground at the seeming end of their endurance. Find that extra strength and push.

I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters,

Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law.

Distant countries, heroic deeds and beautiful women spun around in our turbulent dream.

One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly non- heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous models. That always comes as a shock to newcomers to Scripture: Abraham lied; Jacob cheated; Moses murdered and complained; David committed adultery; Peter blasphemed.

I won’t do a thing,” I said. “Without you I’m not moving.” Through the front window was another cliché, rain raging while the women inside wept like girls. The traffic screamed its emergency around us, but we could do this thing on our own. She was all the world’s money, and I would spend it with her, my sharpest friend who changed the tide, my only comfort from the brutal gamble of the world and the wicked ways of men. I grabbed her hands and clasped them together over her scar into a position of strength, like a prayer we wouldn’t be caught dead saying. Gather around us, heroic women of Haddam. Gather around us and put us under your silken wings. We are here, we are here, we are here, won’t someone take us across the sound together.

Every day of your life, you are faced with opportunities. Unfortunately, the choices that face you are not heroic choices. They are bamboo tree choices. They are small, but progressive choices that steer you in a positive direction and over time you're bound to meet success. For most of us, we spend all our lives waiting for that life changing moment that will change the course of our lives and make us successful. Unfortunately, the clock is ticking. Every day, we choose not to tend to our bamboo tree, a choice is made for us and by the time we realize it, the seasons have passed and we have nothing to show for it.

Many cultural stories worldwide present the domination system as the only human alternative. Fairy tales romanticize the rule of kings and queens over “common people.” Classics such as Homers Illiad and Shakespeare’s kings trilogy romanticize “Heroic violence.” Many religious stories present men’s control, even ownership, of women as normal and moral. These stories came out of the times that oriented much more closely to a “pure” domination system. Along with newer stories that perpetuate these limited beliefs about human nature, they play a major role in how we view our world and how we live in it. But precisely because stories are so important in shaping values, new narratives can help change unhealthy values. Of particular importance are new stories about human nature. We need new narratives that give us a more complete and accurate picture of who we are and who we can be - stories that show that our enormous capacities for consciousness, creativity and caring are integral to human evolution, that these capacities are what make us distinctively human.

When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. The women warriors of current fantasy epics—ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies—to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.

As I researched the history of the heroine it became painfully clear to me that women have had little hand in creating our own heroic myths. Indeed, as Sarah Pomeroy has shown, "[t]he mythology about women is created by men and, in a culture dominated by men, it may have little to do with flesh-and-blood women." And it became equally clear that we will be enclosed by the boundaries of this mythology's limited vision until we begin to create our own.

Someone should advise women to stop fantasizing about courageous firefighters and heroic uniformed soldiers. There is a new sheriff in town who epitomizes a progressive definition of masculinity: Apathetic Cowardly Bystander Man.

I can see the thickness to your skin, Megara. You are tough. Courageous. Proud. I will assist you however I can." Meg had heard tales of Athena helping those on heroic endeavors, but she'd never imagined she'd be worthy of such a thing.

Multitudes are now turning to Christ in all parts of the world. How unbearably tragic it would be, though, if the millions of Asia, South America and Africa were led to believe that the best we can hope for from the Way of Christ is the level of Christianity visible in Europe and America today, a level that has left us tottering on the edge of world destruction. The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes-a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message TOO LOW.

Despite all threats, Prudence Crandall opened the school … The Negro students stood bravely by her side. And then followed one of the most heroic—and most shameful—episodes in American history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall.… The village doctor would not attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building.

We are fortified by exemplary lives, especially those who have earned the right to be respected by their character, sacrifice, patience, and ability to press on in spite of hardship, injustice, pain, and failure. Our heroes do not have to be perfect. They must, however be courageous, authentic, clear-minded, and determined to endure no matter the sacrifice or cost. We need heroes of integrity and consistency, admirable men and women we can admire, not because they exemplify a quick burst of bravery, but because they represent the stuff of greatness and stay at it to the end.

The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others. Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered only one. Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world. I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism. My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top. This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low. In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t give her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances. She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men. Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakable. So I gave Tenar power over—dominion, even godhead—but it was a gift of which little good could come. The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart.

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more longer than a man would do who gave the same criticism.

We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant creates false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, and Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with such lying stories. Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play, narratives that privilege the majority and oppress minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed. This, now, is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and what, if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them. Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.

The progress of Sybilla though a market was the progress of worker bee through a bower of intently propagating blossoms. Everything stuck. From the toy stall she bought two ivory dolls, a hen whistle, a rattle and a charming set of miniature bells for a child’s skirts: all were heroically received and borne by Tom, henceforth marked by a faint, distracted jingling. From the spice booth, set with delicious traps for the fat purse, she took cinnamon, figs, cumin seed and saffron, ginger, flower of gillyflower and crocus and—an afterthought—some brazil for dyeing her new wool. These were distributed between Christian and Tom. They listened to a balladmonger, paid him for all the verses of “When Tay’s Bank,” and bought a lengthy scroll containing a brand-new ballad which Tom Erskine read briefly and then discreetly lost. “No matter,” said the Dowager cheerfully, when told. “Dangerous quantity, music. Because it spouts sweet venom in their ears and makes their minds all effeminate, you know. We can’t have that.” He was never very sure whether she was laughing at him, but rather thought not. They pursued their course purposefully, and the Dowager bought a new set of playing cards, some thread, a boxful of ox feet, a quantity of silver lace and a pair of scissors. She was dissuaded from buying a channel stone, which Tom, no curling enthusiast, refused utterly to carry, and got a toothpick in its case instead. They watched acrobats, invested sixpence for an unconvincing mermaid and finally stumbled, flattened and hot, into a tavern, where Tom forcibly commandeered a private space for the two women and brought them refreshments. “Dear, dear,” said Lady Culter, seating herself among the mute sea of her parcels, like Arion among his fishes. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which are the squashy ones. Never mind. If we spread them out, they can’t take much hurt, I should think. Unless the ox feet … Oh. What a pity, Tom. But I’m sure it will clean off.

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men.

How serious we were, how deadly serious. I was going to be killed and she was prepared to devote her life to my heroic memory. It was one of a million identical dreams of a million olive uniforms and cotton prints. And it might well have ended with the traditional Dear John letter except that she devoted her life to her warrior. Her letters, sweet with steadfastness, followed me everywhere, round, clear handwriting, dark blue ink on light blue paper, so that my whole company recognized her letters and every man was curiously glad for me. Even if I hadn’t wanted to marry Mary, her constancy would have forced me to for the perpetuation of the world dream of fair and faithful women.

...[W]hen women do explode with rage, even if the effect is to catalyze a social movement, their anger will never be recorded, never noted, never recalled or understood as nation-reshaping. The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren't so deeply tragic.

What black men, women, children did in Albany at that time was heroic. They overcame a century of passivity, and they did it without the help of the national government. They learned that despite the Constitution, despite the promises, despite the political rhetoric of the government, whatever they accomplished in the future would have to come from them.

Some gay soldiers and officers, particularly those with a college education, carried with them a mythology, developed from reading the classics and in conversations with other gay men, about "armies of lovers," such as the "Sacred Band of Thebes" in ancient Greece, and heroic military leaders, such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Lawrence of Arabia, who like themselves had had male lovers. This folklore provided them with romantic historical images that could help allay self-doubts before their first combat missions. It confirmed that there had always been gay warriors who fought with courage and skill, sometimes spurred on by the desire to fight bravely by the side of their lovers.

Men's deaths are epic, women's deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don't become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don't begin and end on a battlefield. If he truly wants to understand the nature of the epic story I am letting him compose, he needs to accept that the casualties of war aren't just the ones who die. And that a death off the battlefield can be more noble (more heroic, if he prefers it that way) than one in the midst of fighting. But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn't a footnote, she's a person. And she - all the Trojan women - should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.

It is as heroic as he makes it sound. “Why have I never heard anything about all this—and not just from you? Sophie never said a word. Hell, I didn’t even know that people escaped over the mountains or that there was a concentration camp just for women who resisted the Nazis.” “Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over. Your sister was as desperate to forget it as I was. Maybe that was another mistake I made—letting her forget. Maybe we should have talked about it.

shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism;

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told. I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.

No; I should not like to belong to poor people,” was my reply. “Not even if they were kind to you?” I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork [...]. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life [...]. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life - nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it is good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they are a good family, despite Édouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern - a shame, given his obvious talent. In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academican, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married.

In the campaign of 1876, Robert G. Ingersoll came to Madison to speak. I had heard of him for years; when I was a boy on the farm a relative of ours had testified in a case in which Ingersoll had appeared as an attorney and he had told the glowing stories of the plea that Ingersoll had made. Then, in the spring of 1876, Ingersoll delivered the Memorial Day address at Indianapolis. It was widely published shortly after it was delivered and it startled and enthralled the whole country. I remember that it was printed on a poster as large as a door and hung in the post-office at Madison. I can scarcely convey now, or even understand, the emotional effect the reading of it produced upon me. Oblivious of my surroundings, I read it with tears streaming down my face. It began, I remember: "The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great struggle for national life.We hear the sounds of preparation--the music of boisterous drums--the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see the pale cheeks of women and the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers..." I was fairly entranced. he pictured the recruiting of the troops, the husbands and fathers with their families on the last evening, the lover under the trees and the stars; then the beat of drums, the waving flags, the marching away; the wife at the turn of the lane holds her baby aloft in her arms--a wave of the hand and he has gone; then you see him again in the heat of the charge. It was wonderful how it seized upon my youthful imagination. When he came to Madison I crowded myself into the assembly chamber to hear him: I would not have missed it for every worldly thing I possessed. And he did not disappoint me. A large handsome man of perfect build, with a face as round as a child's and a compelling smile--all the arts of the old-time oratory were his in high degree. He was witty, he was droll, he was eloquent: he was as full of sentiment as an old violin. Often, while speaking, he would pause, break into a smile, and the audience, in anticipation of what was to come, would follow him in irresistible peals of laughter. I cannot remember much that he said, but the impression he made upon me was indelible. After that I got Ingersoll's books and never afterward lost an opportunity to hear him speak. He was the greatest orater, I think, that I have ever heard; and the greatest of his lectures, I have always thought, was the one on Shakespeare. Ingersoll had a tremendous influence upon me, as indeed he had upon many young men of that time. It was not that he changed my beliefs, but that he liberated my mind. Freedom was what he preached: he wanted the shackles off everywhere. He wanted men to think boldly about all things: he demanded intellectual and moral courage. He wanted men to follow wherever truth might lead them. He was a rare, bold, heroic figure.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would he unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

In the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.

Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels.

we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.

The ancient myth of Inanna’s descent has become important to women who are called to explore the archaic face of the feminine and to balance the heroic upper world approach to life with a time of reflection and incubation. There is profound meaning for us today in Inanna’s decision to enter the Underworld and be deeply affected by the mysteries of the dark feminine. I have worked with this myth using ritual to re-engage Inanna’s journey, and it is an extraordinary experience to reenact the descent and feel the Goddesses coming to life in response.

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us: 'A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command, And yet a spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light.

Jess Pepper's review of the Avalon Strings: 'In a land so very civilized and modern as ours, it is unpopular to suggest that the mystical isle of Avalon ever truly existed. But I believe I have found proof of it right here in Manhattan. To understand my reasoning, you must recall first that enchanting tale of a mist-enshrouded isle where medieval women--descended from the gods--spawned heroic men. Most notable among these was the young King Arthur. In their most secret confessions, these mystic heroes acknowledged Avalon, and particularly the music of its maidens, as the source of their power. Many a school boy has wept reading of Young King Arthur standing silent on the shore as the magical isle disappears from view, shrouded in mist. The boy longs as Arthur did to leap the bank and pilot his canoe to the distant, singing atoll. To rejoin nymphs who guard in the depths of their water caves the meaning of life. To feel again the power that burns within. But knowledge fades and memory dims, and schoolboys grow up. As the legend goes, the way became unknown to mortal man. Only woman could navigate the treacherous blanket of white that dipped and swirled at the surface of the water. And with its fading went also the music of the fabled isle. Harps and strings that heralded the dawn and incited robed maidens to dance evaporated into the mists of time, and silence ruled. But I tell you, Kind Reader, that the music of Avalon lives. The spirit that enchanted knights in chain mail long eons ago is reborn in our fair city, in our own small band of fair maids who tap that legendary spirit to make music as the Avalon Strings. Theirs is no common gift. Theirs is no ordinary sound. It is driven by a fire from within, borne on fingers bloodied by repetition. Minds tormented by a thirst for perfection. And most startling of all is the voice that rises above, the stunning virtuoso whose example leads her small company to higher planes. Could any other collection of musicians achieve the heights of this illustrious few? I think not. I believe, Friends of the City, that when we witnes their performance, as we may almost nightly at the Warwick Hotel, we witness history's gift to this moment in time. And for a few brief moments in the presence of these maids, we witness the fiery spirit that endured and escaped the obliterating mists of Avalon.

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable. —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

The documentary and anecdotal evidence is overwhelming and indisputable; the Red Army, which had behaved so heroically on the battlefield, raped the women of Germany as part of their reward, with the active collusion of their officers up to and including Stalin. Indeed he explicitly excused their behaviour on more than one occasion, seeing it as part of the rights of the conqueror. ‘What is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?’ Stalin asked Marshal Tito about the ordinary Russian soldier in April 1945. ‘You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be…

Coming to the balcony, they both rested their elbows on the railing and looked down into the main room, which was filled wall-to-wall with patrons. Evie saw the antique-gold gleam of Sebastian’s hair as he half sat on the desk in the corner, relaxed and smiling as he conversed with the crowd of men around him. His actions of ten days ago in saving Evie’s life had excited a great deal of public admiration and sympathy, especially after an article in the Times had portrayed him in a heroic light. That, and the perception that his friendship with the powerful Westcliff had renewed, were all it had taken for Sebastian to gain immediate and profound popularity. Piles of invitations arrived at the club daily, requesting the attendance of Lord and Lady St. Vincent at balls, soirees, and other social events, which they declined for reasons of mourning. There were letters as well, heavily perfumed and written by feminine hands. Evie had not ventured to open any of them, nor had she asked about the senders. The letters had accumulated in a pile in the office, remaining sealed and untouched, until Evie had finally been moved to say something to him earlier that morning. “You have a large pile of unread correspondence,” she had told him, as they had taken breakfast together in his room. “It’s occupying half the space in the office. What shall we do with all the letters?” An impish smile rose to her lips as she added. “Shall I read them to you while you rest?” His eyes narrowed. “Dispose of them. Or better yet, return them unopened.” His response had caused a thrill of satisfaction, though Evie had tried to conceal it. “I wouldn’t object if you corresponded with other women,” she said. “Most men do, with no impropriety attached—” “I don’t.” Sebastian had looked into her eyes with a long, deliberate stare, as if to make certain that she understood him completely. “Not now.

We are fortified by exemplary lives, especially those who have earned the right to be respected by their character, sacrifice, patience, and ability to press on in spite of hardship, injustice, pain, and failure. Our heroes do not have to be perfect. They must, however be courageous, authentic, clear-minded, and determined to endure no matter the sacrifice or cost. We need heroes of integrity and consistency, admirable men and women we can admire, not because they exemplify a quick burst of bravery, but because they represent the stuff of greatness and stay at it to the end. Finishing strong is a vital part of standing tall.

They chose to root the United States not in an imagined heroic past, but in the country’s real history: the constant struggle of all Americans, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities, to make the belief that we are all created equal and that we have a right to have a say in our democracy come true. People in the U.S. had never lost sight of the promise of democracy because marginalized people had kept it in the forefront of the national experience. From the very first days of the new nation, minorities and women had consistently, persistently, and bravely insisted on their right to equality before the law and to a say in their government.

When the goals of the Self are the only goals a culture makes available, spirited men and women will address them with the energy that they would have applied to the aspirations of the Soul. The result is lives that are massively frustrating and not a little ridiculous. People become heroically dedicated to middle-class ends—getting a promotion, getting a raise, taking immeasurably interesting vacations, getting their children into the right colleges, finding the best retirement spot, fattening their portfolios. Lives without courage, contemplation, compassion, and imagination are lives sapped of significant meaning. In such lives, the Self cannot transcend itself.

We did what we could to preserve it; we could do no more. The most heroic of armies are powerless to prevent the bandits whom they are driving back from murdering the women and children or from deliberately and uselessly destroying all that they find along their path of retreat. There is only one hope left us: the immediate and imperious intervention of the neutral powers. It is towards them that we turn our tortured gaze. Two great nations notably—Italy and the United States—hold in their hands the fate of these last treasures, whose loss would one day be reckoned among the heaviest and the most irreparable that have been suffered in the course of long centuries of human civilization

I am the second Antone Bazil Coutts, but I’d fight anyone who put a junior in back of my name. Or a number. Or called me Bazil. I’d decided I was Joe when I was six. When I was eight, I realized that I’d chosen the name of my great-grandfather, Joseph. I knew him mainly as the author of inscriptions in books with amber pages and dry leather bindings. He’d passed down several shelves of these antiquities. I resented the fact that I didn’t have a brand-new name to distinguish me from the tedious Coutts line—responsible, upright, even offhandedly heroic men who drank quietly, smoked an occasional cigar, drove a sensible car, and only showed their mettle by marrying smarter women. I saw myself as different, though I didn’t know how yet.

A bunch of people from one tribe boldly went into the land of another tribe looting, pillaging and raping and they brought back food, clothing and women as souvenirs of victory and they called this valor and patriotism. And the stories of these exploits would be passed on through generations as some sort of heroic saga. And nobody would question it, for questioning those stories would mean questioning the tribal traditions, which would be an act of treason. Now my question to you, the thinking human of a modern world is - this kind of behavior may have been accepted in those days as uncompromisable tradition when our ancestors were nothing more than mindless savages, but does such tribalism make any sense in a civilized abode such as ours!

I can think of only two movies with women killers we’re meant to sympathize with, and both because they’d been sexually assaulted—Thelma and Louise and Monster. And to be honest, I don’t imagine anyone would call the women in these films heroes. The popular comic book mercenary Red Sonja is, perhaps, a proper hero, but is, once again, motivated by a sexual assault. Male heroes are heroic because of what’s been done to women in their lives, often—the dead child, the dead wife. Women heroes are also heroic for what’s been done to women … to them. We build our heroes, too often, on terrible things done to women, instead of creating, simply, heroes who do things, who persevere in the face of overwhelming odds because it’s the right thing to do.

He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had little known. He believed in beauty and in order, and that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of his life. He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of women. He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour of danger. He exulted in his youth, and he believed that he could never die.

No nation in Latin America is weak-- because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbour the same sentiments, who have the same enemy, who dream about the same better future and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world. Great as was the epic of Latin American independence, heroic as was that struggle, today's generation of Latin Americans is called upon to engage in an epic which is even greater and more decisive for humanity. For that struggle was for liberation from Spanish colonial power, from a decadent Spain invaded by the armies of Napoleon. Today the call for struggle is for liberation from the most powerful world imperialist centre, from the strongest force of world imperialism, and to render humanity a greater service than that rendered by our predecessors.

he truly wants to understand the nature of the epic story I am letting him compose, he needs to accept that the casualties of war aren’t just the ones who die. And that a death off the battlefield can be more noble (more heroic, if he prefers it that way) than one in the midst of fighting. But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself. I will teach him this before he leaves my temple. Or he will have no poem at all.

In my opinion, heroes exist in different degrees, like great men and women: some are even greater than others. But in essence, I believe that a hero is a person who risks his or her own life—maybe even losing it—in a selfless, successful effort to save the life of another. For example, if a mother dives into a river to save her struggling child, she isn’t really a hero; but if she dives into a river to save a struggling child unknown to her, she is clearly a hero if she is successful and if not, she certainly behaved heroically. Likewise, acts of self-defense, even when the lives of others also are at stake, do not quite rise to the level of heroism, although they may be courageous. In addition, the degree of individual heroism grows with various factors, such as nobility of purpose, the degree of risk, and so on. So wartime itself does not produce heroes; instead, it awakens the giants among us.

There must be more than this, Sarah Boyle thinks, from time to time. What could one do to justify one's passage? Or less ambitiously, to change, even in the motion of the smallest mote, the course and circulation of the world? Sometimes Sarah's dreams are of heroic girth, a new symphony using laboratories of machinery and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope and intelligible to all, to heal the bloody breach; a series of paintings which would transfigure and astonish and calm the frenzied art world in its panting race; a new novel that would refurbish language. Sometimes she considers the mystical, the streaky and random, and it seems that one change, no matter how small, would be enough. Turtles are supposed to live for many years. To carve a name, date and perhaps a word of hope upon a turtle's shell, then set him free to wend the world, surely this one act might cancel out absurdity?

Almost a hundred years earlier, to the day, Samuel Smiles had written the final pages of his book Self-Help. It included this moving tale of heroism as an example for the Victorian Englishman to follow. For the fate of my great-grandfather, Walter, it was poignant in the extreme. The vessel was steaming along the African coast with 472 men and 166 women and children on board. The men consisted principally of recruits who had been only a short time in the service. At two o’clock in the morning, while all were asleep below, the ship struck with violence upon a hidden rock, which penetrated her bottom; and it was at once felt that she would go down. The roll of the drums called the soldiers to arms on the upper deck, and the men mustered as if on parade. The word was passed to “save the women and children”; and the helpless creatures were brought from below, mostly undressed, and handed silently into the boats. When they had all left the ship’s side, the commander of the vessel thoughtlessly called out, “All those that can swim, jump overboard and make for the boats.” But Captain Wright, of the 91st Highlanders, said, “No! If you do that, the boats with the women will be swamped.” So the brave men stood motionless. Not a heart quailed; no one flinched from his duty. “There was not a murmur, nor a cry among them,” said Captain Wright, a survivor, “until the vessel made her final plunge.” Down went the ship, and down went the heroic band, firing a volley shot of joy as they sank beneath the waves. Glory and honor to the gentle and the brave! The examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal. As a young man, Walter undoubtedly would have read and known those words from his grandfather’s book. Poignant in the extreme. Indeed, the examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal.

It is the antagonism of the dogmatic world, and the apathy of the rest, that is the cause of the mental progress of the world's not keeping pace with the material progress. Better still, the universal application of the material progress has been far in advance of the universal acceptance of mental achievement. The automobile, the gigantic ocean liner, the talking machine, the electric fan, the elevator, the telephone and the other marvelous achievements of man are being used by the greater portion of the people, whose mental status belongs to the wheelbarrow, the simple chair, the ox cart and the tallow candle. Slight is the realization by the users and beneficiaries of science's modern methods, of the heroic struggles and battles that the great men and women of the past suffered to make possible these accomplishments. Oh, how many suffered torture and death at the hands of the very people they were striving to benefit!

He had succeeded in making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he strove to follow her, marvelling at all the knowledge that was stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale beauty of her face. Follow her he did, though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by critical phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling. Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for -ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman's sake - for a pale woman, a flower of gold.

Westcliff paused at the bedside and glanced at the two women. “This is going to be rather unpleasant,” he said. “Therefore, if anyone has a weak stomach…” His gaze lingered meaningfully on Lillian, who grimaced. “I do, as you well know,” she admitted. “But I can overcome it if necessary.” A sudden smile appeared on the earl’s impassive face. “We’ll spare you for now, love. Would you like to go to another room?” “I’ll sit by the window,” Lillian said, and sped gratefully away from the bed. Westcliff glanced at Evie, a silent question in his eyes. “Where shall I stand?” she asked. “On my left. We’ll need a great many towels and rags, so if you would be willing to replace the soiled ones when necessary—” “Yes, of course.” She took her place beside him, while Cam stood on his right. As Evie looked up at Westcliff’s bold, purposeful profile, she suddenly found it hard to believe that this powerful man, whom she had always found so intimidating, was willing to go to this extent to help a friend who had betrayed him. A rush of gratitude came over her, and she could not stop herself from tugging lightly at his shirtsleeve. “My lord…before we begin, I must tell you…” Westcliff inclined his dark head. “Yes?” Since he wasn’t as tall as Sebastian, it was a relatively easy matter for Evie to stand on her toes and kiss his lean cheek. “Thank you for helping him,” she said, staring into his surprised black eyes. “You’re the most honorable man I’ve ever known.” Her words caused a flush to rise beneath the sun-bronzed tan of his face, and for the first time in their acquaintance the earl seemed at a loss for words. Lillian smiled as she watched them from across the room. “His motives are not completely heroic,” she said to Evie. “I’m sure he’s relishing the opportunity to literally pour salt on St. Vincent’s wounds.” Despite the facetious remark, Lillian went deadly pale and gripped the chair arms as Westcliff took a thin, gleaming lancet in hand and proceeded to gently open and drain the wound.

I now principally allude to Rousseau, for his character of Sophia is, undoubtedly, a captivating one, though it appears to me grossly unnatural; however, it is not the superstructure, but the foundation of her character, the principles on which her education was built, that I mean to attack; nay, warmly as I admire the genius of that able writer, whose opinions I shall often have occasion to cite, indignation always takes place of admiration, and the rigid frown of insulted virtue effaces the smile of complacency, which his eloquent periods are wont to raise, when I read his voluptuous reveries. Is this the man, who, in his ardour for virtue, would banish all the soft arts of peace, and almost carry us back to Spartan discipline? Is this the man who delights to paint the useful struggles of passion, the triumphs of good dispositions, and the heroic flights which carry the glowing soul out of itself? How are these mighty sentiments lowered when he describes the prettyfoot and enticing airs of his little favourite! But, for the present, I waive the subject, and, instead of severely reprehending the transient effusions of overweening sensibility, I shall only observe, that whoever has cast a benevolent eye on society, must often have been gratified by the sight of humble mutual love, not dignified by sentiment, nor strengthened by a union in intellectual pursuits. The domestic trifles of the day have afforded matter for cheerful converse, and innocent caresses have softened toils which did not require great exercise of mind, or stretch of thought: yet, has not the sight of this moderate felicity excited more tenderness than respect? An emotion similar to what we feel when children are playing, or animals sporting, whilst the contemplation of the noble struggles of suffering merit has raised admiration, and carried our thoughts to that world where sensation will give place to reason. Women are, therefore, to be considered either as moral beings, or so weak that they must be entirely subjected to the superior faculties of men.

Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman changed all that when he bought the character for the movies. Sherman hired Boyd, a veteran of the silent screen whose star had faded, to play a badman in the original film. But Boyd seemed more heroic, and Sherman switched the parts before the filming began. As Cassidy, Boyd became a knight of the range, a man of morals who helped ladies cross the street but never stooped to kiss the heroine. He was literally black and white, his silver hair a vivid contrast to his black getup. He did not smoke, believed absolutely in justice, honor, and fair play, and refused to touch liquor. Boyd’s personal life was not so noble. Born in Ohio in 1898, he had arrived in Hollywood for the first golden age, working with Cecil B. DeMille in a succession of early silents. By the mid-1920s he was a major star. Wine, women, and money were his: he drank and gambled, owned estates, married five times. But it all ended when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for possession of whiskey and gambling equipment.

He was a child when he went away: he was a child who had looked much on pain and evil, and remained a fantasist of the Ideal. Walled up in his great city of visions, his tongue had learned to mock, his lip to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. Again and again he had been bogged in the gray slough of factuality. His cruel eyes had missed the meaning of no gesture, his pocked and bitter heart had sweltered in him like a hot ingot, but all his hard wisdom melted at the glow of his imagination. He was not a child when he reflected, but when he dreamt, he was; and it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. He believed in the fine flowers of tenderness and gentleness he had little known. He believed in beauty and in order, and that he would wreak out their mighty forms upon the distressful chaos of his life. He believed in love, and in the goodness and glory of women. He believed in valiance, and he hoped that, like Socrates, he would do nothing mean or common in the hour of danger. He existed in his youth, and he believed that he could never die.

An old man wearing a red seed cap was saying, "Little lady, one day you'll remember the days people told you that you had nice legs as a good memory." Adam braced for the explosion. It was nails and dynamite. "Good--memory? Oh, I wish I were as ignorant as you! What happiness! There are girls who kill themselves over negative body image and you--" "Is there a problem here?" Adam broke in. The man seemed relieved. People were always pleased to see clean, muted Adam, the deferential Southern voice of reason. "Your girlfriend's quite a firecracker." Adam stared at the man. Blue stared at Adam. He wanted to tell her it wasn't worth it--that he'd grown up with this sort of man and knew they were untrainable--but then she'd throw the thermos at Adam's head and probably slap the guy in the mouth. It was amazing that she and Ronan didn't get along better, because they were different brands of the same impossible stuff. "Sir," Adam started--Blue's eyebrows spiked--"I think maybe your mama didn't teach you how to talk to women." The old man shook his head at Adam, like in pity. Adam added, "And she's not my girlfriend." Blue flashed him a brilliant look of approval, and then she got into the car with a dramatic door slam Ronan would have approved of. "Look, kid," the old man started. Adam interrupted, "Your fuel door's open, by the way." He climbed back into his little, shitty car, the one Ronan called the Hondayota. He felt heroic for no good reason. Blue simmered righteously as they pulled out of the station. For a few moments, there was nothing but the labored sounds of the little car's breathing. Then Noah said, "You do have nice legs, though." Blue swung at him. A helpless laugh escaped Adam, and she hit his shoulder too.

By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Tsar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and musing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? So I reflected, crumbling my bread and stirring my coffee and now and again looking at the people in the street. The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

By my early twenties, I was still devoted to heroic woman stories, but the love narratives had started to lose some of their appeal. The release of a new Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks vehicle seemed far less interesting to me than the latest installment of the Alien movie franchise. Had I lost interest in romance? Far from it. In fact, this was at the time in my life when I was very serious about finding a great love. However, I was also struggling to be my own person, to understand my identity, to follow my own dreams and start down my chosen career path. I had plans to travel the world, to attend graduate school. I was coming into—and exercising—my own forms of strength and independence. But I was tired of the one-sided representations of male-identified characters doing this, of feeling that only one version of this kind of empowerment existed. I wanted balance and social justice. I wanted to see more evidence of women on screen doing the same, women making a difference, doing something amazing, and being the heroes of their own lives and stories. Unfortunately, there weren’t very many female-bodied characters who did that who also got to find love. In fact, the more romance a woman enjoyed in a narrative, the less strength or independence of any kind she expressed in the story, especially before the last two decades. (3)

As a viewer, I was left torn, wanting the women to have it all, to not seem to be excluded if they dared to transgress the traditional female gender role, but finding myself presented with heroines who never did, who seemingly had to choose between heroic accomplishment and romance, and who made it more complicated to see these options as possible for other than the male-identified. This representational “either/or” is one more symptom of the so-called war between the sexes that continues to confound feminists about the roles romantic relationships play in our lives and even the idea of romance itself: how are we to be dedicated to empowering ourselves and others but also to find a real romantic connection if that interests us? (4)

Essay: Scientific Advances are Ruining Science Fiction I write science fiction thrillers for a living, set five to ten years in the future, an exercise that allows me to indulge my love of science, futurism, and philosophy, and to examine in fine granularity the impact of approaching revolutions in technology. But here is the problem: I’d love to write pure science fiction, set hundreds of years in the future. Why don’t I? I guess the short answer is that to do so, I’d have to turn a blind eye to everything I believe will be true hundreds of years from now. Because the truth is that books about the future of humanity, such as Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, have ruined me. As a kid, I read nothing but science fiction. This was a genre that existed to examine individuals and societies through the lens of technological and scientific change. The best of this genre always focused on human beings as much as technology, something John W. Campbell insisted upon when he ushered in what is widely known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. But for the most part, writers in past generations could feel confident that men and women would always be men and women, at least for many thousands of years to come. We might develop technology that would give us incredible abilities. Go back and forth through time, travel to other dimensions, or travel through the galaxy in great starships. But no matter what, in the end, we would still be Grade A, premium cut, humans. Loving, lusting, and laughing. Scheming and coveting. Crying, shouting, and hating. We would remain ambitious, ruthless, and greedy, but also selfless and heroic. Our intellects and motivations in this far future would not be all that different from what they are now, and if we lost a phaser battle with a Klingon, the Grim Reaper would still be waiting for us.

Unlike modernism...postmodernism does not see everything as cosmologically, heroically new; rather, its concept of newness or creation is hinged on a sophisticated, almost cynical, sense that all the good and evil, in their most extreme forms, have been tried, somewhere, somehow, and sometime before, and what is left for contemporary men and women is nothing more than shrewd and occasionally breathtaking eclecticism, synthesis, reproduction, and representation in the most literal sense.

It’s made to believe Women are same as Men; Are you not convinced Daughters can also be heroic?

The great women and men of the world were all givers, not takers. Renounce the common delusion that those who accumulate the most win. Instead, do work that is heroic

Obviously, mothers are older than the children they birth. They have experienced birth, infancy, schooling, illness, failure, success, dating, marriage, pregnancy, death and other facets of worldly existence. By the time most women become mothers they have already experienced abuse, fear, hatred and envy, not to mention self-loathing, self-condemnation, guilt and shame. Consequently, unless a woman is psychologically empowered it is unlikely that she has come to terms with the effects of these experiences and syndromes. By not confronting the dark sides of her own Anima and Animus she is unable to overcome her moral and emotional deviance and reintegrate her authentic Self-image. Rather than engage in a dragon-fight with her own negative Anima, and heroically emerge, she decides instead to become a terrible mother herself.

As women, we sometimes have trouble asking for help,” says my friend Jenny. “Maybe we really do want to do it all, or don’t want to admit we can’t. Or we think our husbands should intuitively know what help we need, and if they don’t we’re annoyed. But doing everything ourselves isn’t heroic—it’s toxic.

Before visiting Staten Island, I'd never met a day laborer. To me, a city girl who knew undocumented men mostly as restaurant workers, day laborers seemed like an almost mythical archetype, groups of brown men huddled at the crack of dawn on street corners next to truck rental lots and hardware superstores and lumberyards. Historically, legislators and immigration advocates have parted the sea of the undocumented with a splintered staff—working brown men and women on one side and academically achieving young brown people on the other, one a parasitic blight, the other heroic dreamers.

This has destroyed the meaning of climbing Mount Everest. Once the impossible summit, it was climbed by heroic men seeking to conquer nature. Look at the summit now and it looks like a velvet rope-corralled line at a nightclub in snow. Spending good money, these new men and women simply want the photo and the marketed trip. It is devoid of soul. It is no accomplishment. It is a purchase.

FREEDOM is never one’s birthright. Brave heroic men and women paid the ultimate price for it.

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

They are fond of reading and they read all sorts of books, even serious scientific books, but they usually lay the book down after reading two or three pages, for they feel completely satisfied. Their imagination, mobile, volatile, light, is already excited, their senses are attuned, and a whole dream-like world, with its joys and sorrows, with its heaven and hell, its ravishing women, heroic deeds … suddenly possesses the entire being of the dreamer … Sometimes whole nights pass unnoticed in undescribed joys; sometimes a paradise of love or a whole lifetime … is experienced in a few hours … The moments of sobering up are terrible; the poor unfortunate cannot bear them and he immediately takes more of his poison in new increased doses.

Proverbs 31 belongs to the literary genre of heroic poetry, which is 'characterized by recounting the hero's mighty deeds, usually his military exploits.

Why is it that no matter how many strong, heroic ezer stories we find in our Bibles...we are never called to this kind of bold proactive living?

Another connection came to light for me much later, in the process of writing this book. Although it’s unusual for girls to be raised by their fathers, each of the women I’d chosen to write about—Laura, Alana, and Madeline—had been brought up mostly by her dad. I didn’t realize this until long afterward. It came as quite a shock: out of the thousands of women I’ve treated in therapy, I unconsciously chose three who were, in one important respect, raised as I was. No wonder I identified with them. It’s a perfect example of a psychologist being ruled by her unconscious and not realizing it.

In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones. This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year. As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.

Ceauşescu wanted to increase the population, to breed more workers. Population growth meant economic growth. If you were childless, you were taxed. Everyone knew Ceauşescu’s decrees: The fetus is the property of the entire society! Heroic women give children to the homeland! Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter! Mama had only managed to have two children. She felt guilty about it. “Fertility under state control? That’s an abuse of human rights!” Bunu would wail. “How can families take care of multiple children with no electricity and so little food? Cristian, there is no happy ending here.

This is a critical point to make. As we examine the narratives of men, as we look at their stories, what we find with great redundancy is the expectation for them to perform for women. From the mandate to please mothers, to protection and provision for women, to heroic sacrifice and even down to the basic assumed responsibility for the female orgasm, we see men in a role to satisfy through performance.

All men are sinners, the Fathers of the Faith teach us. Even the noblest of kings and the most chivalrous of knights may find themselves overcome by rage and lust and envy, and commit acts that shame them and tarnish their good names. And the vilest of men and the wickedest of women likewise may do good from time to time, for love and compassion and pity may be found in even the blackest of hearts. “We are as the gods made us,” wrote Septon Barth, the wisest man ever to serve as the Hand of the King, “strong and weak, good and bad, cruel and kind, heroic and selfish. Know that if you would rule over the kingdoms of men.

he questioned the book’s basic premise: that the women who survive (or don’t survive) a war are equally heroic as their menfolk. The men go and fight, the women don’t, was his essential argument. Except that women do fight (not least Penthesilea and her Amazons), even if the poems heralding their great deeds have been lost. And men don’t always: Achilles doesn’t fight until book eighteen of the twenty-four-book Iliad. He spends the first seventeen books arguing, sulking, asking his mother for help, sulking some more, letting his friend fight in his stead, offering advice and refusing apologies. But not fighting. In other words, he spends almost three-quarters of the poem in a quasi-domestic setting, away from the battlefield. Yet we never question that he is a hero.

Besides cooking, baking, cleaning, and the full-time role of wife and mother, there were cows to milk, gardens to tend, candles and soap to be made, butter to churn. As would be said, “Working butter with wooden paddles in the large wooden bowl, molding it, and cleaning the pails and utensils was as much a part of women’s work as washing dishes.” Butter was a major element of the frontier diet and making good butter was a skill in which women took particular pride. Then there was yarn to spin, wool to weave, clothes to make for large families, clothes to wash, mend, and patch. And just as the man of the house had his ax, plowshare, long rifle, and those other tools necessary for the work to be faced, so, too, did the woman of the house—knives, needles, spoons, paddles, hickory brooms, spinning wheels, and most important, the bulbous, heavy iron pots to be seen in nearly every cabin that were used more for cooking than any other item and led to countless aching backs by the end of the day.

There is a relatively common narrative that rape victims transform their experience into literature or art. Becoming the heroic protagonist in a heartbreaking narrative – creating ‘something’ from their experience, that others can find value in. The way that the #metoo campaign required women to share their stories for others comes from the same narrative: we’re expected to use this traumatic experience in ways that are productive for others. Yet many women who have survived rape are unable to process what has happened to them, let alone, turn it into fodder for the masses. I was emotionally paralysed for 17 years after my rape. Unable to articulate my experience. Confined and consumed by a white space of nothingness.

One must suspect, finally, that many women judged the heroic adventure of their men as some kind of outrageous folly thrust upon them by obedience to patriarchal ritual.

Circella crumbled. But the unexpected happened. Bioff, little Willie the Pimp, who’d gone Hollywood, flashed gold business cards with inlaid diamonds, went ballistic. Women were off limits. You could kill a guy, beat a guy, but this? Now, he went heroic. He contacted U.S. Attorney Boris Kostelanetz from a jail house visitor phone and got right to it: ‘This is Bioff . . . what do you want to know?’ First, Boris Kostelanetz wanted to know why Bioff was talking. The reply was immediate: ‘We’re doing time for them. They’re killing our families.

Standish O’Grady in his “Early Bardic History of Ireland” says: “I must confess that the blaze of Bardic light which illuminates those centuries at first dazzles the eye and disturbs the judgment . . . (but) that the Irish kings and heroes should succeed one another, surrounded by a blaze of Bardic light, in which both themselves and all those who were contemporaneous with them are seen clearly and distinctly, was natural in a country where in each little realm or sub-kingdom the ard-ollam was equal in dignity to the King, as is proved by the equivalence of their eric. The dawn of English history is in the seventh century — a late dawn, dark and sombre, without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates reliably from a point before the commencing of the Christian Era — illumined with that light which never was on sea or land — thronging with heroic forms of men and women — terrible with the presence of the supernatural and its over-reaching power.

While the squire pulled out a flat weed she was beside herself with pity for humanity. This short, this fearful loveliness, in which men and women, heroic and baffled, struggling to wisdom, age as they struggle; wrestle upwards and drop into the ground. This marriage, this association, with matter, what a high-handed experiment, but what admirable victims! Man, with his eye on death, draws his foot from the womb. There is not time for anything, yet there is time for everything. No sooner appreciate love than skin withers, no sooner grow wise than we are unfit for wisdom. Learning to live and defeated by death. Discovery succeeds discovery, and nothing accumulates. We live haunted. We grasp and grasp; what we hold dissolves, our very hands dissolve.

Susan Margaret Collins was born on December 7, 1952 in Caribou, Maine and is presently the senior United States Senator from Maine. Senator Collins has served in the Senate since 1997 and chaired the Senate Committee on Homeland Security from 2003 to 2007. She now is the Chairwoman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Collins is a graduate of St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts college, in Canton, New York. Considered a moderate Republican, she became the only Republican in the U.S. Senate currently representing a state in New England. Her vote was one of three republican votes in the Senate that helped to defeat a bill designed to destroy the Affordable Health Care Program presently in effect. John McCain's heroic stand only mattered because Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski bravely stood by him! It was their courage that saved health care for approximately 22 million people.

Could she have known that it was her own image that, Waldo wrote, “rose before me at times into heroical & godlike regions, and I could remember no superior women”? Indeed, to Waldo, who had once unkindly disrupted her Conversations on classical myth, Margaret was best compared to “Ceres, Minerva, Proserpine, and the august ideal forms of the Foreworld.” He had not told her this, but perhaps somehow she knew.

Most women take commitment seriously and put in heroic efforts to make things work.

Cheered on by the growing crowd, Gabrielli joined forces with Mario. My teacher said, “In antiquity, pederasty was seen as an educational institution for the inculcation of moral and cultural values by the older man to the younger, as well as a form of sexual expression. It gained representation in history from the Archaic period onwards in Ancient Greece.” Both men had created an imaginary platform, as if speaking in a forum at an ancient amphitheater. “According to Plato, in ancient Greece, pederasty was a relationship and a bond, be it sexual or chaste, between an adult man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family. “Most Greek men engaged in sexual relations with both women and boys, though exceptions to the rule were known; some avoided relations with women and others rejected relations with boys. In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, with older men taking advantage of their dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors. They carried on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.” My teacher spoke heroically.

Most Greek men engaged in sexual relations with both women and boys, though exceptions to the rule were known; some avoided relations with women and others rejected relations with boys. In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, with older men taking advantage of their dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors. They carried on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.” My teacher spoke heroically.

I know formidable women, dozens of them, women who fight and who win... Noble women. Heroic ones.

Or at least of fending him off for long enough that we can sweep in heroically like the Seventh Cavalry.’ Burning tipis and shooting women and children, I thought. And

Flying women raise important questions about what exactly constitutes the heroic female.

[On D. W. Griffith] What he had above all, his ability as a craftsman and artist, would be hard enough—and quite unnecessary—to write of, if we had typical scenes before us, or within recent memory; since we have seen so little of his work in so many years, it is virtually impossible. I can remember very vividly his general spirit and manner-heroic, impetuous, tender, magniloquent, naive, beyond the endowment or daring of anybody since; just as vividly, I can remember the total impression of various major sequences. By my remembrance, his images were nearly always a little larger and wilder than life. The frame was always full, spontaneous, and lively. He knew wonderfully well how to contrast and combine different intensities throughout an immense range of emotion, movement, shadow, and light. Much of the liveliness was not intrinsic to the characters an the screen or their predicament, but was his own vitality and emotion; and much of it—notably in the amazing flickering and vivacity of his women—came of his almost maniacal realization of the importance of expressive movement.

The book of Genesis is a window into what cultures were like before the revelation of the Bible. One thing we see early on is the widespread practice of primogeniture—the eldest son inherited all the wealth, which is how they ensured the family kept its status and place in society. So the second or third son got nothing, or very little. Yet all through the Bible, when God chooses someone to work through, he chooses the younger sibling. He chooses Abel over Cain. He chooses Isaac over Ishmael. He chooses Jacob over Esau. He chooses David over all eleven of his older brothers. Time after time he chooses not the oldest, not the one the world expects and rewards. Never the one from Jerusalem, as it were, but always the one from Nazareth. Another ancient cultural tradition revealed in Genesis is that in those societies, women who had lots of children were extolled as heroic. If you had many children, that meant economic success, it meant military success, and of course it meant the odds of carrying on the family name were secure. So women who could not have children were shamed and stigmatized. Yet throughout the Bible, when God shows us how he works through a woman, he chooses the ones who cannot have children, and opens their wombs. These are despised women, but God chooses them over ones who are loved and blessed in the eyes of the world. He chooses Sarah, Abraham’s wife; Rebecca, Isaac’s wife; Samuel’s mother, Hannah; and John’s mother, Elizabeth. God always works through the men or the boys nobody wanted, through the women or girls nobody wanted.

She’d taken some anthropology courses, because they’d seemed interesting, so she knew the dynamics of sexual instincts. That had to be it. Women responded to strong, powerful, or heroic men. In caveman days, that had meant higher chances of survival. Women didn’t have to do that now, but the old instincts remained; how else could one explain the allure of Donald Trump for so many women?

You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course, the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have borne from time immemorial--they all lived. It wasn't that the world didn't care. They struggled heroically, for generations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity.

that's what love-driven leaders do. They see further. They move themselves beyond what blocks our vision in order to see what a fairer, more welcoming world might look like. They point the way to a future in which true men and women will enjoy greater chances to reach their potential. And leaders guided by the resolve that "love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words" help create that better future.

Common thieves like Ludlow were simply another London

Today, the world remembers the tragic events of September 11, 2001. We are still shocked and dismayed at the infamy of those cowardly attacks. During the past year, we have come to know the heroic acts of men and women whose courage and selflessness were manifest on that terrible day. So many lost their lives. So many friends and families have been deprived of dear ones. Today we pause to remember and join in tribute to those whose lives were taken and to those who have carried on so bravely in their absence. We know that much good has come of these dreadful circumstances. From the smoke and ashes of New York, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and other areas of the world has arisen a greater sense of unity and purpose in ridding the earth of evil and providing for the freedom and security of all people. We endorse the righteous efforts of God-fearing people everywhere in this important endeavor. May our Father in Heaven smile upon us all, comfort those who continue to mourn, and guide the leaders of nations in the quest for justice and liberty, is our sincere prayer. Thank you.

Light Breeze As regards feeling pain, like a hand cut in battle, consider the body a robe you wear. When you meet someone you love, do you kiss their clothes? Search out who's inside. Union with God is sweeter than body comforts. We have hands and feet different from these. Sometimes in dream we see them. That is not illusion. It's seeing truly. You do have a spirit body; don't dread leaving the physical one. Sometimes someone feels this truth so strongly that he or she can live in mountain solitude totally refreshed. The worried, heroic doings of men and women seem weary and futile to dervishes enjoying the light breeze of spirit.

She looked at Julien before returning her gaze to Gabriel, who watched her unabashedly. Did her son not recognize the man, their savior? Did none of the boys remember their servant? He looked so much as he had all those years ago, though Rowena realized that he must be now, what six and thirty? He still had the long straight nose of his Gallic ancestors and the thick black hair, though he had acquired a few patches of gray at his temples. His eyes were pale greenish blue and framed by thick brows and lashes. He had high patrician cheekbones and a strong noble jaw, though he certainly was no nobleman. “Allow me to introduce the most celebrated man in all of England,” the countess said, finally indicating Gabriel. “This is a fellow Frenchman, Monsieur Lemarque. But he is better known as the French Fox.” Bastien gasped. “Good God, man, is that you?” He cut his gaze to his mother. Most of the family was aware of her fascination with the French Fox. She’d followed the reports of his feats of bravery religiously. The way he’d snatched innocent aristos—mothers and children, old men—from the blade of the guillotine was nothing short of heroic. He escaped even the most intricate traps the enemy laid for him, seemed to laugh in the face of danger, risked everything for men and women to whom he owed nothing. She was half in love with the mysterious spy already. And Gabriel was the French Fox. It all made sense now. Gabriel, the man who had once held her hand when they’d been hiding from revolutionaries—“Do not fear, duchesse. I will die before I allow these devils to so much as look at you.” Now Gabriel smiled thinly and glanced at Lady Winterson. “That was supposed to be our secret, my lady.” Rowena took a slow, shaky breath as heat flooded through her. His voice. That accent. Lady

The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

Sailors huddled in the skulls on the beach, using the carapace as cover, clutching spears and cowering before the monster. It was as tall as a building, swarming with arrowhead luckspren. Lopen pulled to a stop in the air, holding Huio. The cousins met one another’s eyes. Then Huio groaned. “I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I?” “Ha!” Lopen said. “You were going to get eaten! You were going to be swallowed by a giant monster that looks like something you’d step on during worming season!” “Can we focus on the fight?” “Hey, have you heard about the time I saved Huio from being swallowed? Oh yes. He was going to get eaten. By a monster uglier than the women he courts. And I flew into the thing’s mouth to save him. Off the tongue. Then I was very humble about having done such a heroic deed.

Radical Enlightenment is the system of ideas that, historically, has principally shaped the Western World’s most basic social and cultural values in the post-Christian age. This in itself lends the history of the movement great importance. But this type of thought—especially in many Asian and African countries, as well as in contemporary Russia—has also become the chief hope and inspiration of numerous besieged and harassed humanists, egalitarians, and defenders of human rights, who, often against great odds, heroically champion basic human freedom and dignity, including that of women, minorities, homosexuals, and religious apostates, in the face of the resurgent forms of bigotry, oppression, and prejudice that in much of the world today appear inexorably to be extending their grip.

Women are, all of them, the veritable images of Śakti. In northwest India the bride holds a knife in her hand at the time of marriage; in Bengal, a nut-cutter. The meaning is that the bridegroom, with the help of the bride, who is the embodiment of the Divine Power, will sever the bondage of illusion. This is the ‘heroic’ attitude. I never worshipped the Divine Mother that way. My attitude toward Her is that of a child toward its mother.

Though the story sounds like a myth because it’s dressed in tales of heroic soldiers and kingdoms, Cole is really modeling how ideologies truly function in society. She has given the kingdom of Njaza a controlling image of women, an ideologically driven stereotype that provides justification for the existing social relations. Controlling images, according to sociologist and leading Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins, provide cover, making it seem that the way things are is how they should be.

Why isn't every woman a feminist? Feminism tells a tale of female injury, but the average woman in heterosexual intimacy knows that men are injured too, as indeed they are. She may be willing to grant, this average woman, that men in general have more power than women in general. This undoubted fact is merely a fact; it is *abstract*, while the man of flesh and blood who stands before her is *concrete*: His hurts are real, his fears palpable. And like those heroic doctors on the late show who work tirelessly through the epidemic even though they may be fainting from fatigue, the woman in intimacy may set her own needs to one side in order better to attend to his. She does this not because she is "chauvinized" or has "false consciousness," but because *this is what the work requires*. Indeed, she may even excuse the man's abuse of her, having glimpsed the great reservoir of pain and rage from which it issues. Here is further gloss on the ethical disempowerment attendant upon women's caregiving: In such a situation, a woman may be tempted to collude in her own ill-treatment.

Whatever Ralph advises will be sure to be right," replied Evelyn, with the soft conviction of his infallibility which caused her to be considered by most of Ralph's masculine friends an ideal wife. It is women without reasoning powers of any kind whom the nobler sex should be careful to marry if they wish to be regarded through life in this delightful way by their wives. Men not particularly heroic in themselves, who yet are anxious to pose as heroes in their domestic circle, should remember that the smallest modicum of common-sense on the part of the worshipper will inevitably mar a happiness, the very existence of which depends entirely on a blind unreasoning devotion. In middle life the absence of reason begins perhaps to be felt; but why in youth take thought for such a far-off morrow! (from: Sir Charles Danvers)

(Years later when I read the historical novelist Yamamoto Shugoro’s Nihon fudoki [An Account of the Duties of Japanese Women], I recognized my mother in these impossibly heroic creatures, and I was deeply moved.)

In the aristocratic world of a few years later, “women,” according to Bussy-Rabutin, “gained as much esteem for men as arms.” The conquest of a celebrated beauty was equivalent, very nearly, to the conquest of a province. For their triumphs in the boudoir and the bed, such men as Marsillac and Nemours and the Chevalier de Grammont enjoyed a fame almost equal, while it lasted, to that of Gustavus Adolphus or Wallenstein. In the fashionable slang of the time, one ‘embarked’ on one of these glorious affairs, embarked deliberately and self-consciously for the express purpose of cutting a more considerable figure in the world. Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence—either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion or, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage. With his peasant girls and his middle-class widows of little scruple and large appetite, the parson could get all the self-transcendence he wanted. Philippe Trincant now offered an occasion for the most agreeable and modish kind of self-affirmation—with a hoped-for sequel, when the conquest had been consummated, of some peculiarly rare and precious kind of sensual self-transcendence.

One thing Gamache knew for sure. Little Frederick Lawson had not picked up his stick, pointed it, and slaughtered a village filled with old men, and women and children. So how did one become the other? How did a nine-year-old boy acting out heroics become a twenty-year-old man committing an atrocity?

Life's too short to play small with your talents. “You were born into the opportunity as well as the responsibility to become legendary. You’ve been built to achieve masterwork-level projects, designed to realize unusually important pursuits and constructed to be a force for good on this tiny planet. You have it in you to reclaim sovereignty over your primal greatness in a civilization that has become fairly uncivilized. To restore your nobility in a global community where the majority shops for nice shoes and acquires expensive things yet rarely invests in a better self. Your personal leadership requires—no, demands—that you stop being a cyber-zombie relentlessly attracted to digital devices and restructure your life to model mastery, exemplify decency and relinquish the self-centeredness that keeps good people limited. The great women and men of the world were all givers, not takers. Renounce the common delusion that those who accumulate the most win. Instead, do work that is heroic—that staggers your marketplace by the quality of its originality as well as from the helpfulness it provides. While you do so, my recommendation is that you also create a private life strong in ethics, rich with marvelous beauty and unyielding when it comes to the protection of your inner peace. This, my friends, is how you soar with the angels. And walk alongside the gods.

Life's too short to play small with your talents. “You were born into the opportunity as well as the responsibility to become legendary. You’ve been built to achieve masterwork-level projects, designed to realize unusually important pursuits and constructed to be a force for good on this tiny planet. You have it in you to reclaim sovereignty over your primal greatness in a civilization that has become fairly uncivilized. To restore your nobility in a global community where the majority shops for nice shoes and acquires expensive things yet rarely invests in a better self. Your personal leadership requires—no, demands—that you stop being a cyber-zombie relentlessly attracted to digital devices and restructure your life to model mastery, exemplify decency and relinquish the self-centeredness that keeps good people limited. The great women and men of the world were all givers, not takers. Renounce the common delusion that those who accumulate the most win. Instead, do work that is heroic—that staggers your marketplace by the quality of its originality as well as from the helpfulness it provides. While you do so, my recommendation is that you also create a private life strong in ethics, rich with marvelous beauty and unyielding when it comes to the protection of your inner peace. This, my friends, is how you soar with the angels. And walk alongside the gods.

Life’s too short to play small with your talents,” The Spellbinder spoke to the room of thousands. “You were born into the opportunity as well as the responsibility to become legendary. You’ve been built to achieve masterwork-level projects, designed to realize unusually important pursuits and constructed to be a force for good on this tiny planet. You have it in you to reclaim sovereignty over your primal greatness in a civilization that has become fairly uncivilized. To restore your nobility in a global community where the majority shops for nice shoes and acquires expensive things yet rarely invests in a better self. Your personal leadership requires—no, demands—that you stop being a cyber-zombie relentlessly attracted to digital devices and restructure your life to model mastery, exemplify decency and relinquish the self-centeredness that keeps good people limited. The great women and men of the world were all givers, not takers. Renounce the common delusion that those who accumulate the most win. Instead, do work that is heroic—that staggers your marketplace by the quality of its originality as well as from the helpfulness it provides. While you do so, my recommendation is that you also create a private life strong in ethics, rich with marvelous beauty and unyielding when it comes to the protection of your inner peace. This, my friends, is how you soar with the angels. And walk alongside the gods.

Since the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism, it has become especially important to identify the dangers of individualism. Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism. Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to disassociate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very heart of the mid-twentieth-century US freedom movement. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.

Who would have known that much of the wealth in their nation’s booming economy was created on the other side of the world by the most brutal mistreatment of other human beings, many of them women and children?

The eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was the undisputed leader of the unfiltered pack and is believed, among other accomplishments, to have bedded seven thousand women; he is said to have snipped and kept a lock of hair from each of them.

It wouldn’t be entirely clear to him until 1787, but in the meantime, as a first step in the right direction, Wilberforce championed two bills, both of which failed. One was for parliamentary reform and the other was a strange and ghoulish bill combining two macabre issues: putting an end to the burning of women at the stake, and selling the corpses of hanged criminals for dissection.

Another detrimental effect of undervaluing people skills was that in some cases, programmers were rewarded more for raw code production than for meeting the user's needs. Marge Devaney, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950's, recalled sex differences in how programmers judged their performance. Asked if she had ever experienced gender bias on the job, sh replied that discrimination was difficult to prove, adding, "With things like computing, it's very hard to judge who's doing the best. Is it better to produce a program quickly and have it full of bugs that the users keep hitting, and so it doesn't work? Or is it better to produce it more slowly and have it so it works?...I do know some of the men believed in the first way: 'Throw it together and let the user debug it!'" This critique is echoed by women today who find their male peers rewarded for averting disasters through heroic last-minute efforts, while women's efforts at preventing such problems through careful work and communication with users go unrecognized. As a female software engineer complained in 2007, "Why don't we just build the system right in the first place? Women are much better at preventive medicine. A Superman mentality is not necessarily productive; it's just an easy fit for the men in the sector.

win. The story of Jason isn’t a heroic quest; it’s a warning about the dangers of ruthless women.

I want to do something splendid...something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.

Still, I see much current fantasy and science fiction in full retreat from real human needs. Where a Tolkien prophetically faced the central fact of our time, our capacity to destroy ourselves, the present spate of so-called heroic fantasy, in which Good defeats Evil by killing it with a sword or staff or something phallic, seems to have nothing in mind beyond instant gratification, the avoidance of discomfort, in a fake-medieval past where technology is replaced by magic and wishful thinking works.

On the road, between one settlement and another, as they swing along, sometimes on foot, their songs were not the heroic songs of the hall but coarse drinking songs that, when she understood them, she didn’t like. She didn’t like the way they made the men smell, the way they fingered under their tunics and looked at the hard, thin-faced camp women who spoke Anglisc and wore knives and strike-a-lights on their belts, but no distaffs, no spindles; women who darned and mended but never spun, never wove.

[...] This reputation carried down the centuries immediately following, with this twelfth-century poem a testament to how she was perceived a quarter of a millennium after her death: Heroic Æthelflæd! Great in marital fame, A man in valour, though a woman in your name: Your warlike hosts by nature you obeyed, Conquered over both, though born by sex a maid.