Martin E. Dempsey Quotes

People who are the salt of the earth get up and go to a job that they hate.

I bought my parents a house. Then I bought myself a Rolex. My brother forced me to do it, but I'm glad he did.

If I don't call my mom back, she'll go on Twitter and say, 'Adam hasn't called me. I'm worried about him,' and strangers will say, 'You're horrible. You go call your mom right now!' It's very complicated.

There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.

My mother has always been unhappy with what I do. She would rather I do something nicer, like be a bricklayer.

I feared disappointing my father more than anything in the world.

My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more.

My mother speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother's anxiety.

I knew your father before you did, and I don't think he'd be too proud of what you're doing right now.

My dad wanted me to be a professional person, which I was - I was a civil engineer. I graduated from civil engineering at USC in California. I became an engineer, and I helped design the roads for the L.A. County Roads Department. And I did that for about one and a half years in a sense to please my parents - to be a 'respectable' person.

When you're young and desperate to hold on to a place in the team you do whatever is asked of you.

I never wanted to disappoint my family at all.

I kept quiet for eight years. I did not want to hurt the church.

I think the most dangerous word in the English language is 'should.' 'I should have done this.' Or 'I should do that.' 'Should' implies responsibility. It connotes demand. Which is just not the case. Life ebbs and flows.

December 25th has become guilt and obligation.

I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.

What upset me the most was not that I would die, but that I was letting down my parents. I felt very guilty for chasing this dream career of mine, at the expense of my parents.

My dad was not happy about my not becoming an architect like him.

She's not happy about the life she is living but to jump through the hoop would mean to succumb to death.

All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

I felt sorry I enlisted.

The greatest mistake of my life was obtaining a military education.

Motherhood is like a big sleeping bag of guilt.

I am a West Point graduate and an Army veteran.

For me, high school was the one place where I knew my friends were gonna be, so I was there. I didn't like it, I wasn't involved in things, and they didn't teach me anything that I needed to know. But my mom said I had to go, and so I went.