“Razom nas bahato, nas ne podolati!” (Together we are many, we cannot be defeated!)
Undecided Adrian, yours made me (quite literally) laugh out loud. And I love your username.
Well, personally, I kinda want to slay the dragon. Let’s go to work. -Angel, Angel “Not Fade Away”
“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies”.
Andy Dufresne, Shawshank Redemption.
“Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth. I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me.”
Babylon 5, season 4.
Couple from the Marines at Belleau Wood.
For a little background, the Germans launched their Spring Offensive using troops freed up from the Eastern Front in 1918. French and British troops, exhausted by 4 years of constant warfare strained to contain the offensive. Green American troops were used to plug the gaps that were opening on the road to Paris.
At one instance the 5th Marines were going to the line to stop the German, and passing retreating French troops. One officer called out to a Marine commander, imploring him to retreat and safe his unit.
“Retreat? Hell, we just got here” was his response.
Then there’s 2 time Medal of Honor winner Dan Daly’s quote “Come on you sons of bitches, you want to live forever?”
Absolutely. This was featured prominently in a good friend’s blog Re: his fourteen-year-old daughter’s battle with cancer; she lost it on the tenth of this month.
Churchill’s “finest hour” quote always makes me tear up a little.
And appropriate to the Canadian Olympics:
“A true man does not only stand up for himself, he stands up for those that do not have the ability to”. – William Lyon Mackenzie King
Perhaps not quite in the spirit of the thread, but I’ve always been more impressed by actions than words. I give you: “Tank Man”, in the moments before his famous confrontation in Tiannamen Square: Behind the Scenes: A New Angle on History - The New York Times . He’s in the background, left side, the tanks perhaps a block away. He can run, as the men in the foreground have chosen to do. He can simply stand aside, and the tanks will likely pass him by - they have more pressing business.
Instead, he steps into the street.
If I should ever face real crisis, real danger, and I show one tenth of this man’s courage, I could go to whatever fate awaited me with the very deepest sense of pride.
Orange Revolution, right? I’ve a bit of orange ribbon from Kiev hanging on my wall. I like to think - though I do not know for certain, of course - that it adorned the arm of a protestor.
Even through the darkest phase
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin
“Constant Craving” kd lang
Al Pacino as the football coach in Any Given Sunday:
"I don’t know what to say, really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives all comes down to today. Either we heal as a team or we are going to crumble. Inch by inch, play by play, 'til we’re finished. We are in Hell right now, gentlemen, believe me, and we can stay here and get the shit kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of Hell. One inch, at a time.
Now I can’t do it for you. I’m too old. I look around and I see these young faces and I think … I mean I made every wrong choice a middle age man could make. I uh… I pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who has ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror. You know when you get old in life things get taken from you. That’s, that’s part of life.
But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half step too late or too early, you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game, every minute, every second.
On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us, to pieces for that inch. We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch. Cause we know when we add up all those inches that’s going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and LOSING. Between LIVING and DYING.
I’ll tell you this. In any fight it is the guy who is willing to die who is going to win that inch. And I know, if I am going to have any life anymore, it is because I am still willing to fight and die for that inch, because that is what LIVING is. The six inches in front of your face.
Now I can’t make you do it. You gotta look at the guy next to you. Look into his eyes. Now I think you are going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You are going to see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team because he knows, when it comes down to it, you are gonna do the same thing for him.
That’s a team, gentlemen, and either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That’s football, guys. That’s all it is. Now, whattaya gonna do?"
And this, from Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, who drove off a Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590’s:
“He who fights to live will die. But he who fights to die will live.”
It is indeed. 
An apochryphal Winston Churchill story: after he gave his famous “we will fight them in the streets and on the landing beaches…” speech he quietly remarked to a friend, “And we will fight them by throwing empty beer bottles at them, because right now that’s all we have.”
"Non Serviam."
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
- Monument at Thermopylae
A couple (both sadly untrue) from Pierre Cambron commanding what was left of Napoleon’s Old Guard at Waterloo when called upon to surrender:
The Guard dies. The Guard does not surrender.
and/or (a little more succinct):
Merde!
I don’t know if this counts but I find it deeply moving: The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still.
From Frank Herbert’s excellent ‘Dune’.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.