Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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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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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Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.
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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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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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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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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 try to be a person of faith.
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Service is the rent we pay for living.
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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 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 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 need to work outside government, on my own.
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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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If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans and the very dream that is America.
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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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If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
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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 cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.
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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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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.