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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None of the candidates are ever perfect, ok? Then you have to get them in there and you have to hold them accountable. You have to make noises.
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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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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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Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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Don't be afraid of hard work.
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We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
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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.