Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

You are in charge of your own attitude whatever others do or circumstances you face. The only person you can control is yourself...worry more about your attitude than your aptitude or lineage.

The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.

It is time for every one of us to roll up our sleeves and put ourselves at the top of our commitment list.

If it's wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it's wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.

Together we can and must fight for justice for our children and protect them from draconian tax cuts and budget choices that threaten their survival, education and preparation for the future. If they are not ready for tomorrow, neither is America.

This act will leave a moral blot on his presidency

[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

I'm sure I am impatient sometimes. I sure do get angry sometimes. I think it's outrageous how hard it is to get this country to feed its children and to take care of its children, to give them a decent education.

I also grew up with community co-parents who looked out for each other. They looked out for children and tried to be the hands of God. They tried to live their faith.

So often we think we have got to make a difference and be a big dog. Let us just try to be little fleas biting. Enough fleas biting strategically can make a big dog very uncomfortable.

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.

The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.

Don't just dream about grandiose acts of doing good. Every day do small ones, that add up over time to positive patterns.

We are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another.

Homeless shelters, child hunger, and child suffering have become normalized in the richest nation on earth. It's time to reset our moral compass and redefine how we measure success.

So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.

Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.

Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.

Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.

Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don't want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.

None of the candidates are ever perfect, ok? Then you have to get them in there and you have to hold them accountable. You have to make noises.

We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.

When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people’s children, I’m doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found.

You can achieve much in life if you don't mind doing the work and giving someone else the credit.

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back - but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do. The world wasn't so wonderful back then, with segregated rule in the South. But we were never hopeless and we never despaired because we had adults out there struggling with us, being there for us, and buffering us.

Luckily, I had incredible parents who, when they saw a problem, didn't say, "Why doesn't somebody do something?" They would say, "Why don't we do something?".

God, please help us remember that all the darkness in the world cannot snuff out the light of one little candle. Help us to keep lighting our little candles until a mighty torch of justice sweeps our nation and the world.

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

We have the capacity to make sure that every mother has pre-natal care. Yet, we don't do it. What is it about America? It says we don't value children and families. We are hypocrites.

It is so important not to let ourselves off the hook or to become apathetic or cynical by telling ourselves that nothing works or makes a difference. Every day, light your small candle.... The inaction and actions of many human beings over a long time contributed to the crises our children face, and it is the action and struggle of many human beings over time that will solve them-with God's help. So every day, light your small candle.

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage.

It is the responsibility of every adult... to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them and that they are not alone.

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children and have been linked to low birth weight and birth defects, obesity, mental and physical health problems, and poorer educational outcomes.

I'm tough in the sense that I believe as strongly in what I'm doing as anybody else believes in what they are doing.

Hope is the best contraceptive.

I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.

The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.

People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.

I was taught that the world had a lot of problems; that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate; and that service is the rent each of us pays for living - the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reached your personal goals.

As I contemplate the kind of future I want for children-my own and other people's-I believe we must look inward to God for guidance and strength and backward to draw on the values and legacies of our families, ancestors, and communities.

You really can change the world if you care enough.