Quotes By Marian Wright Edelman

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Service is what life is all about.

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.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

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.

In politics, there are no friends.

I try to act out of faith.

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.