Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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Education is a precondition to survival in America today.
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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.
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I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do. The world wasn't so wonderful back then, with segregated rule in the South. But we were never hopeless and we never despaired because we had adults out there struggling with us, being there for us, and buffering us.
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Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.
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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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The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
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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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There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.
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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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Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
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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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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.
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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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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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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 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.
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Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.
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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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Service is the rent we pay for living.
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Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.
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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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I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did.
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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.