Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

We're spending, on average, three times more for prison than for public-school pupils. That's the dumbest investment policy. It doesn't make us safer.

I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents. We've got to send messages to our kids about what is important.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can't stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence.

[Martin Luther ] King didn't pick his leadership position. Most movements are not started by single people.

You didn't have a choice about the parents you inherited, but you do have a choice about the kind of parent you will be.

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

It really takes a community to raise children, no matter how much money one has. Nobody can do it well alone. And it's the bedrock security of community that we and our children need.

You can't be what you can't see.

I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

You just do it one step at a time.

You'd better stay determined, because that's how our ancestors got us where we are.

I don't care what my children choose to do professionally, just as long as within their choices they understand they've got to give something back.

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.

It's time for greatness - not for greed. It's a time for idealism - not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.

If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

There were these great women in Montgomery, [Rosa Louise] Parks was among them. Jo Ann Robinson [who organized the bus boycott] was among them. It's always these ordinary women and men of grace who have been waiting and seething and planning to change things that are unjust that bring movement.

Children under five are the poorest age group in America, and one in four infants, toddlers and preschoolers are poor during the years of greatest brain development.

Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.

Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few.

Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.

Democracy cannot breathe, indeed will die, if those enjoined to protect it and uphold the laws snuff it out - with no consequences.

We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.

Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay - it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.

As [Martin Luther] King said, it never cost anybody a dime to integrate the lunch counters. When you start talking about trying to deal with jobs and hunger and things that require investment, then that's really the tough stuff, because everybody wants to do right if it doesn't cost them anything.

The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight.

You were born God's original. Try not to become someone's copy.

To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.

Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.

I hope that people of all faiths will start looking for our too-invisible children who are crying out for help.

It is [children] who are God's presence, promise and hope for mankind.

Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.

I try to act out of faith.

The literacy level at Mississippi prisons? Fifth grade. Can't read, what are you going to do? If you've got a conviction rap, what are you going to do? It's a real crisis.

There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.

I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did.

Don't be afraid of hard work.

In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.

Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.

Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up.

In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad.

Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.

If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.