Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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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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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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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Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
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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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No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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 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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Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.
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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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I try to be a person of faith.
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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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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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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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The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.