Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In politics, there are no friends.

I try to act out of faith.

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

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

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.

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.

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

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.

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.

A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

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.

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.

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

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.