Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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.
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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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Education is a precondition to survival in America today.
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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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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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People who don't vote have no call on political leaders!
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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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There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.
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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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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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The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
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I try to be a person of faith.
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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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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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Service is the rent we pay for living.