Marian Wright Edelman
45 quotes
Biography
"Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night."
"Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right."
"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."
"The Bible is replete with the images and power of small things which achieve great ends when they are grounded in faith: a mustard seed, a jawbone, a stick, a slingshot, a widow's mite. 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 Montgomery, Alabama, Jonah and I went to the Civil Rights Memorial, and then we walked around to Dexter Baptist Church and went up into Martin's pulpit. I'd forgotten what a little place it was. We looked out from the little pulpit in that little church and talked about how something so big started from a place so small. Just a lot of committed people of faith in church on one side of the street, and all the power of Alabama in the state capitol right across the street. As a young lawyer, I used to listen to Dr. King in chapel at Spelman College. One of the thngs I liked about him was that he didn't pretend to be a great powerful know-it-all. I remember him discussing openly his gloom, depression, his fears, admitting that he didn't know what the next step was. He would then say: "Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.""
"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."
"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."
"Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts."
"No person has the right to rain on your dreams."
"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."
"Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it."
"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."
"Education is a precondition to survival in America today."
"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."
"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 try to act out of faith."
"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 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."
"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."
"The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children."
"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."
"A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future."
"Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree."
"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."
"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."