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.

Service is what life is all about.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You really can change the world if you care enough.