Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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There comes a time when you roll up your sleeves and put yourself at the top of your commitment list.
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Our true remembrance to President Kennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinished work today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.
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When I started out as an activist, the issues were much clearer. There's advantage to the new media, but on the other hand, you miss the ability to frame an issue that you had when there were just three TV networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. So the whole world could see the same police dogs. The same Bull Connor and his white tank. Now you've got narrow-casting. The media is all fragmented. It's so hard to get people to focus in a sustained way.
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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.
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I've been struck by the upside-down priorities of the juvenile justice system. 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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[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].
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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.
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Democracy is not a spectator sport.
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That's not to say that some of the new media is not advantageous. You can reach lots of folks with what Black Lives Matter is doing, mobilizing people. God bless them.
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God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one.
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You can't be what you can't see.
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Service is what life is all about.
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You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.
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Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.
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Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
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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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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.
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Our government has to be held accountable for enforcing the law. Tamir Rice, the fact that they could exonerate that police person [who killed him], and Tamir's family was charged for the ambulance to take him [to the hospital]. It's inhumane.