Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.
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I try to be a person of faith.
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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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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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Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.
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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'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.
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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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Service is the rent we pay for living.
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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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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'm tough in the sense that I believe as strongly in what I'm doing as anybody else believes in what they are doing.
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The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.
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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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I need to work outside government, on my own.
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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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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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Children cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.
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We're spending, on average, three times more for prison than for public-school pupils. That's the dumbest investment policy. It doesn't make us safer.
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We're a violent nation, and we need to confront it. This gun plague has to stop.
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It really takes a community to raise children, no matter how much money one has. Nobody can do it well alone. And it's the bedrock security of community that we and our children need.
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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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Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.
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If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.