Marian Wright Edelman Quotations

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

You really can change the world if you care enough.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

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.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I need to work outside government, on my own,

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.

In my generation, we learned how to be leaders by being exposed to and involved with adults who empowered us and gave us a sense that we could choose things. We've let down the generations coming behind us and we are trying to re- establish that connection.

You'd better stay determined, because that's how our ancestors got us where we are.

It is time for every one of us to roll up our sleeves and put ourselves at the top of our commitment list.

God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one.

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.

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.

In politics, there are no friends.

Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors. Count on earning them by hard work and perseverance.

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.

Ordinary women of grace are, in a sense, my real role models.

There comes a time when you roll up your sleeves and put yourself at the top of your commitment list.

Children cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.

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.

The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.

Democracy cannot breathe, indeed will die, if those enjoined to protect it and uphold the laws snuff it out - with no consequences.

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.

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.

Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.

Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.

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.

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.

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.

You just do it one step at a time.

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.

I try to act out of faith.

I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did.

No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.

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.

It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.

In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.

There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.

the poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight ...

Don't be afraid of hard work.

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.

You were born God's original. Try not to become someone's copy.

Never work just for money. Money alone won't save your soul or build a decent family life or help you sleep at night. We're the richest nation on Earth, with the highest number of imprisoned people in the world. Our drug addictions and child poverty are among the highest in the industrialized world. So don't ever confuse wealth or fame with character.

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.

I was taught that the world had a lot of problems; that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate; and that service is the rent each of us pays for living - the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reached your personal goals.

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

Amidst protestations of 'Who can be against the children?' too few people are FOR children when it really matters.

Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.

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.