Top 100 Marian Wright Edelman Quotes
#1. Hillary Clinton worked with Marian Wright Edelman in Children's Defense Fund. That's all you need to do know.
Rush Limbaugh
#2. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#12. The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.
Marian Wright Edelman
#13. There comes a time when you roll up your sleeves and put yourself at the top of your commitment list.
Marian Wright Edelman
#15. [Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].
Marian Wright Edelman
#16. Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
Marian Wright Edelman
#18. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
Marian Wright Edelman
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#23. Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.
Marian Wright Edelman
#24. Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.
Marian Wright Edelman
#25. 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
#27. 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
#29. The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
Marian Wright Edelman
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. I've always hated being hemmed in or seeing anybody being hemmed in. Even when I was the smallest child, I couldn't bear being told I couldn't drink at a so-called white drinking fountain.
Marian Wright Edelman
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.
Marian Wright Edelman
#41. Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
Marian Wright Edelman
#42. I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do.
Marian Wright Edelman
#44. 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
#45. Homeless shelters, child hunger, and child suffering have become normalized in the richest nation on earth. It's time to reset our moral compass and redefine how we measure success.
Marian Wright Edelman
#46. To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.
Marian Wright Edelman
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
Marian Wright Edelman
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.
Marian Wright Edelman
#55. The literacy level at Mississippi prisons? Fifth grade. Can't read, what are you going to do? If you've got a conviction rap, what are you going to do? It's a real crisis.
Marian Wright Edelman
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#64. 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
#65. As I contemplate the kind of future I want for children-my own and other people's-I believe we must look inward to God for guidance and strength and backward to draw on the values and legacies of our families, ancestors, and communities.
Marian Wright Edelman
#66. 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
#67. Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors.
Count on earning them by hard work
and perseverance.
Marian Wright Edelman
#68. In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.
Marian Wright Edelman
#71. You'd better stay determined, because that's how our ancestors got us where we are.
Marian Wright Edelman
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#78. I don't care what my children choose to do professionally, just as long as within their choices they understand they've got to give something back.
Marian Wright Edelman
#79. We've got the wrong vision, the wrong values, the wrong priority, and as the great prophetic figure Marian Edelman Wright puts it, we have been AWOL when it comes to poor people and poor children.
Cornel West
#83. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#84. 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
#87. 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
#90. We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
Marian Wright Edelman
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. 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?".
Marian Wright Edelman
#95. 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
#97. Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.
Marian Wright Edelman
#98. Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
Marian Wright Edelman
#99. 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
#100. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
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