Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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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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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Service is the rent we pay for living.
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Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.
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People who don't vote have no call on political leaders!
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You have to have a fundamental change in the culture of policing, and who is the police person. How do they change? How do you learn from England and the other places, or Australia? In England, they don't carry guns on the whole. It's a different kind of mentality that does not demonize, and it's justified on race and income and class.
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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.
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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.
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I get very upset with all of the crowd seekers today, and people out there trying to get on TV. It ain't about you. It's about trying to make the world more just for everybody.
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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.
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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.
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You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public, corporate, and private lives.
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People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that.
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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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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.
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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.
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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?".
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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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No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
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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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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
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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.
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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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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.