Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

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

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

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

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

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

In politics, there are no friends.

- Marian Wright Edelman

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

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

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

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

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

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

You really can change the world if you care enough.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

The key is that your children are aware that you love them a lot, and that you are there when they really, really need you. If a kid was ill, I would simply leave a meeting and go home.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.

- Marian Wright Edelman

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.

- Marian Wright Edelman

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

- Marian Wright Edelman

Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.

- Marian Wright Edelman

I need to work outside government, on my own.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.

- Marian Wright Edelman

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

- Marian Wright Edelman

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

- Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

- Marian Wright Edelman

In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad.

- Marian Wright Edelman

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

- Marian Wright Edelman

Service is what life is all about.

- Marian Wright Edelman