Marian wright edelman quotes

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.

People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that.

Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence.

Don't count out Marian Wright Edelman, because there is talk that President Clinton may want to shock the nation by putting a real black on the Supreme Court.

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.

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.

Each American must remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.

Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.

The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves.

Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Don't assume a door is closed; push on it. Don't assume if it was closed yesterday that it is closed today. Don't ever stop learning and improving your mind. If you do, you're going to be left behind.

When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I try to be a person of faith.

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.

Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.

Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right. Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right.

This act will leave a moral blot on his presidency

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.

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

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

Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.

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?".

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.

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 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.

Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.

In my generation, we learned how to be leaders by being exposed to and involved with adults who empowered us and gave us a sense that we could choose things. We've let down the generations coming behind us and we are trying to re- establish that connection.

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

Children cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.

Children must have at least one person who believes in them. It could be a counselor, a teacher, a preacher, a friend. It could be you. You never know when a little love, a little support will plant a small seed of hope.

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.

The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be, our ideal of freedom and justice, how we were going to be different, and what the American experiment was going to be about.

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.

Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.

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.

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.

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

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.

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.

God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one.

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

[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].

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, Let all children come unto me.

It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.

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.

So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.

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.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.

You really can change the world if you care enough.

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

Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors. Count on earning them by hard work and perseverance.

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.

You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.

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.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

Service is the rent we pay for living.

Service is what life is all about.

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.

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.

Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.

Ordinary women of grace are, in a sense, my real role models.

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.

I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to.

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.

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

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

Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.

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

There are so many noises and pulls and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.

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

Hope is the best contraceptive.

So much of America's tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people's children--as if justice were divisible.

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

No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.

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

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.

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.

You just do it one step at a time.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

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

In politics, there are no friends.

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

We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.

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

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.

A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.

It is utterly exhausting being Black in America - physically, mentally, and emotionally. While many minority groups and women feel similar stress, there is no respite or escape from your badge of color.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.