Marian Wright Edelman

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

In politics, there are no friends.

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.

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

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.

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

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

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.

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.

Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but dont count on them.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If you dont 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 didn't have a choice about the parents you inherited, but you do have a choice about the kind of parent you will be.

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

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

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.

Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

Dont feel entitled to anything you didnt sweat and struggle for.

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.

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.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

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.

Service is what life is all about.

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.

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.

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.

You really can change the world if you care enough.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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