You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain

About

"You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" is a quote uttered by Harvey Dent in the 2008 DC Comics superhero action film The Dark Knight. The quote, which is meant to the dubious nature of heroism in the face of time, has been since used in various commentaries to describe the fall from grace of a well-known and popular public figure, as well as in image macros relating to fandoms outside of the Batman universe.

Origin

The quote was originally said by the character of Harvey Dent (portrayed by Aaron Eckhart), the District Attorney of Gotham City who eventually takes on the role of the super-villain "Two Face," in the second film of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy released on July 14th, 2008. In the film, Dent utters the line during his first face-to-face encounter with Bruce Wayne (portrayed by Christian Bale) at a restaurant, which serves as a foreshadowing to his own fate of turning into a tragic hero.

Harvey Dent: When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city. It wasn’t considered an honor; it was considered a public service.

Rachel Dawes: Harvey, the last man who they appointed to protect the Republic was named Caesar, and he never gave up his power.

Harvey: Well, I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Look, whoever the Batman is, he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life doing this. How could he? Batman's looking for someone to take up his mantle.

In the final scene of the film, the line is emphatically reiterated by Bruce Wayne as Batman in a conversation with James Gordon (portrayed by Gary Oldman).

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can do those things because I'm not a hero, like Dent. I killed those people. That's what I can be.

Spread

Shortly after the release of the film in July 2008, several critical reviews of the film highlighted Harvey Dent's adage as one of the more memorable and poetic lines featured in The Dark Night. On July 4th, 2010, Yahoo Answers^[4] user Nicole submitted a post asking for an in-depth explanation of the quote, which is the earliest known instance of many similar queries to follow on other Q&A reference communities like Quora^[7] and StackExchange.^[5] In 2012, image macro parodies and commentaries based on the original quote and its phrasal template ("you either die a X or you live long enough to see yourself become the Y") began to surface on several internet humor sites, including CollegeHumor^[18], Cheezburger^[19], Quickmeme^[12][14][20], Dorkly^[11], Memerial^[10] and HugeLOL^[16] (see Examples section), as well as social news and media-sharing communities like Imgur^[15], Reddit^[24] and Tumblr.^[23] On November 23rd, 2013, Urban Dictionary^[6] user TheAllKnowingOne submitted an explanation of the quote as "a philosophical summary that, no matter what good you intend to do, as long as you live and continue, you will bring about just as much evil as good, if not more through accident or intent."

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References