Faith & Spirit Quote by John Osborne

Osborne takes a wrecking ball to hero worship with the blunt practicality of someone who’s watched too many myths curdle up close. The first move is the deflation: “Heroes… are mortal and not divine.” It’s not just a reminder that famous people die; it’s an attack on the psychological bargain audiences make when they elevate someone into an emblem. By insisting on mortality, Osborne yanks the hero back into the messy category of the human - bodies, appetites, cowardice, compromise.

The phrasing “whatever high ideas we may have” pins the problem on “we.” Heroes aren’t born on pedestals; they’re installed there by public need. That’s the subtext Osborne keeps returning to across his work: postwar Britain’s hunger for tidy moral figures in a world that no longer supports tidy morals. The line reads like a corrective to a culture that wants saviors instead of accountability.

Then he sharpens the knife: “We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.” The joke is dark, almost theological in its insult. If you take creation as a baseline innocence, human agency becomes the scandal - we don’t merely fall short, we actively degrade ourselves. It also undercuts sentimental excuses: if people are “much worse,” it’s not because they were destined to be; it’s because they chose to be.

Osborne’s intent isn’t to sneer at courage or greatness. It’s to strip away the comforting fantasy that virtue is a separate species. Heroes, like everyone else, are capable of rot. The real warning is about the audience: when you need your heroes to be divine, you’re setting yourself up to be lied to - or to forgive what shouldn’t be forgiven.