Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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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Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
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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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Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.
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I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.
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We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.
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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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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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So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.
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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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There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage.
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We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
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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 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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I need to work outside government, on my own.
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What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.
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When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.
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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.
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The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.
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Don't be afraid of hard work.
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If it's wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it's wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.
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There are so many noises and pulls and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.
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I'm tough in the sense that I believe as strongly in what I'm doing as anybody else believes in what they are doing.