Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

Service is what life is all about.

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.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You really can change the world if you care enough.

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

The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

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.

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.

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