Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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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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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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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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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You can't be what you can't see.
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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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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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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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Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.
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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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Children cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.
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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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I try to be a person of faith.
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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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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 need to work outside government, on my own.
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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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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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Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.
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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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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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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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The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight.