Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?
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We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
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So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.
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Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
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Never work just for money. Money alone won't save your soul or build a decent family life or help you sleep at night. We're the richest nation on Earth, with the highest number of imprisoned people in the world. Our drug addictions and child poverty are among the highest in the industrialized world. So don't ever confuse wealth or fame with character.
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Let all children come unto me.
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Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
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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.
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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.
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Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors. Count on earning them by hard work and perseverance.
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We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.
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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.
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There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.
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The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can achieve much in life if you don't mind doing the work and giving someone else the credit.
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Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.
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It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.
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Don't be afraid of hard work.
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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.
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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.
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The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means.
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Dr. King used to say, 'I was sitting in the back of the bus, but my mind was always up front.' Don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it. You aim high and you work very hard and now I think it's clear that you can be anything you want to.
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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.
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Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.
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You can't be what you can't see.
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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.
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If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans and the very dream that is America.
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