Top 100 Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
#2. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#3. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#4. Don't assume a door is closed; push on it. Don't assume if it was closed yesterday that it is closed today. Don't ever stop learning and improving your mind. If you do, you're going to be left behind.
Marian Wright Edelman
#5. Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.
Marian Wright Edelman
#6. Don't just dream about grandiose acts of doing good. Every day do small ones, that add up over time to positive patterns.
Marian Wright Edelman
#8. The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.
Marian Wright Edelman
#9. There comes a time when you roll up your sleeves and put yourself at the top of your commitment list.
Marian Wright Edelman
#11. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
Marian Wright Edelman
#12. Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.
Marian Wright Edelman
#13. The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means.
Marian Wright Edelman
#15. It is utterly exhausting being Black in America - physically, mentally, and emotionally. While many minority groups and women feel similar stress, there is no respite or escape from your badge of color.
Marian Wright Edelman
#16. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#18. I get very upset with all of the crowd seekers today, and people out there trying to get on TV. It ain't about you. It's about trying to make the world more just for everybody.
Marian Wright Edelman
#19. The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
Marian Wright Edelman
#20. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#21. My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.
Marian Wright Edelman
#22. The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.
Marian Wright Edelman
#23. You are in charge of your own attitude whatever others do or circumstances you face. The only person you can control is yourself ... worry more about your attitude than your aptitude or lineage.
Marian Wright Edelman
#24. A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.
Marian Wright Edelman
#25. The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.
Marian Wright Edelman
#26. A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back-but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.
Marian Wright Edelman
#29. So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.
Marian Wright Edelman
#31. So often we think we have got to make a difference and be a big dog. Let us just try to be little fleas biting. Enough fleas biting strategically can make a big dog very uncomfortable.
Marian Wright Edelman
#32. So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.
Marian Wright Edelman
#33. It is the responsibility of every adult ... to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them and that they are not alone.
Marian Wright Edelman
#34. Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
Marian Wright Edelman
#35. The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
Marian Wright Edelman
#36. It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.
Marian Wright Edelman
#38. It is time for every one of us to roll up our sleeves and put ourselves at the top of our commitment list.
Marian Wright Edelman
#39. Our true remembrance to President Kennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinished work today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.
Marian Wright Edelman
#41. Dr. King used to say, 'I was sitting in the back of the bus, but my mind was always up front.' Don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it. You aim high and you work very hard and now I think it's clear that you can be anything you want to.
Marian Wright Edelman
#42. Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
Marian Wright Edelman
#43. I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to.
Marian Wright Edelman
#44. The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction
Marian Wright Edelman
#45. Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors.
Count on earning them by hard work
and perseverance.
Marian Wright Edelman
#46. In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.
Marian Wright Edelman
#48. The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be, our ideal of freedom and justice, how we were going to be different, and what the American experiment was going to be about.
Marian Wright Edelman
#49. When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, Let all children come unto me.
Marian Wright Edelman
#50. Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few.
Marian Wright Edelman
#51. It's time for greatness
not for greed. It's a time for idealism
not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.
Marian Wright Edelman
#54. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#57. Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.
Marian Wright Edelman
#59. We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
Marian Wright Edelman
#60. The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight ...
Marian Wright Edelman
#61. The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves.
Marian Wright Edelman
#63. If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.
Marian Wright Edelman
#64. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#65. I'm sure I am impatient sometimes. I sure do get angry sometimes. I think it's outrageous how hard it is to get this country to feed its children and to take care of its children, to give them a decent education.
Marian Wright Edelman
#66. Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence.
Marian Wright Edelman
#67. We have the capacity to make sure that every mother has pre-natal care. Yet, we don't do it. What is it about America? It says we don't value children and families. We are hypocrites.
Marian Wright Edelman
#68. Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up.
Marian Wright Edelman
#70. There are so many noises and pulls and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.
Marian Wright Edelman
#71. Don't count out Marian Wright Edelman, because there is talk that President Clinton may want to shock the nation by putting a real black on the Supreme Court.
Marian Wright Edelman
#72. If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
Marian Wright Edelman
#73. Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right. Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right.
Marian Wright Edelman
#75. I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
Marian Wright Edelman
#76. Amidst protestations of 'Who can be against the children?' too few people are FOR children when it really matters.
Marian Wright Edelman
#77. Children under five are the poorest age group in America, and one in four infants, toddlers and preschoolers are poor during the years of greatest brain development.
Marian Wright Edelman
#78. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#81. We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.
Marian Wright Edelman
#83. God, please help us remember that all the darkness in the world cannot snuff out the light of one little candle. Help us to keep lighting our little candles until a mighty torch of justice sweeps our nation and the world.
Marian Wright Edelman
#84. I hope that people of all faiths will start looking for our too-invisible children who are crying out for help ...
Marian Wright Edelman
#85. We all need to get out of our safety zones too. In addition to voting, we need to embarrass people who don't do the right thing. It's going to take citizen action.
Marian Wright Edelman
#86. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#88. Our government has to be held accountable for enforcing the law. Tamir Rice, the fact that they could exonerate that police person [who killed him], and Tamir's family was charged for the ambulance to take him [to the hospital]. It's inhumane.
Marian Wright Edelman
#90. We are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another.
Marian Wright Edelman
#91. Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don't want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.
Marian Wright Edelman
#93. You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.
Marian Wright Edelman
#94. Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year.
Marian Wright Edelman
#95. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#96. Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children and have been linked to low birth weight and birth defects, obesity, mental and physical health problems, and poorer educational outcomes.
Marian Wright Edelman
#97. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#98. Children must have at least one person who believes in them. It could be a counselor, a teacher, a preacher, a friend. It could be you. You never know when a little love, a little support will plant a small seed of hope.
Marian Wright Edelman
#99. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#100. I worry about the kids who have too much. As a parent living in a so-called good neighborhood with children who went to private high school, I found myself spending much time in parent groups worrying about alcohol, unsupervised parties, and parents not being parents.
Marian Wright Edelman
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