Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
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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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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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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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You can't be what you can't see.
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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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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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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 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'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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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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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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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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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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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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I need to work outside government, on my own.
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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 poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight.
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It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.
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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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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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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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I try to be a person of faith.
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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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So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.