Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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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Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.
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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
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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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People who don't vote have no call on political leaders!
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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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Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.
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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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I'd like to transform the system in very fundamental ways, but you've got to do that in every way that you can. You can't wait for some magic bullet or some magic politician or some magic anything to have that happen. You got to get out there and use your vote.
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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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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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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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Service is the rent we pay for living.
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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.
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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. We've got to send messages to our kids about what is important.
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Together we can and must fight for justice for our children and protect them from draconian tax cuts and budget choices that threaten their survival, education and preparation for the future. If they are not ready for tomorrow, neither is America.
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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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I try to be a person of faith.
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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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Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.
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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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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 hope that people of all faiths will start looking for our too-invisible children who are crying out for help.
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I try to act out of faith.