Marian Wright Edelman

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

Parents have become so convinced educators know what is best for 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

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.
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

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

You really can change the world if you care enough.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
Marian Wright Edelman

Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay -- it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.
Marian Wright Edelman

Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.
Marian Wright Edelman

Service is what life is all about.
Marian Wright Edelman

Being considerate of others will take you and your children further in life than any college or professional degree.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

We are living in a time of unbearable dissonance between promise and performance; between good politics and good policy; between professed and practiced family values; between racial creed and racial deed; between calls for community and rampant individualism and greed; and between our capacity to prevent and alleviate human deprivation and disease and our political and spiritual will to do so.
Marian Wright Edelman

I've been struck by the upside-down priorities of the juvenile justice system. 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

There's ignorance in people who just don't know that we have a national child emergency. And there are a lot of people who are conveniently ignorant--they don't want to know.
Marian Wright Edelman

The inability to get health care because people lack insurance, kills, less traumatically, and less visibly than terrorism, but the result is the same. And poor housing and poor education and low wages kills the spirit and the capacity and the quality of life that all of us deserve.
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

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

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

When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people's children, I'm doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found.
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

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

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

We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.
Marian Wright Edelman

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?
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

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

There?s no free lunch. Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.
Marian Wright Edelman

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? That's a government subsidy of families, yet we resent putting money directly into public housing. We take our deduction for dependent care yet resent putting money directly into child care. Common sense and necessity are beginning to erode old notions of the private invasion of family life, because so many families are in trouble.
Marian Wright Edelman, Psychology Today