Marian Edelman Wright Quotes & Sayings

We all need to get out of our safety zones too. In addition to voting, we need to embarrass people who don't do the right thing. It's going to take citizen action. — Marian Wright Edelman

I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did. — Marian Wright Edelman

Don't feel entitled to anything you don't sweat and struggle for — 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 call on political leaders! — Marian Wright Edelman

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given. — Marian Wright Edelman

Amidst protestations of 'Who can be against the children?' too few people are FOR children when it really matters. — Marian Wright Edelman

You just do it one step at a time. — Marian Wright Edelman

It is the responsibility of every adult ... to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them and that they are not alone. — Marian Wright Edelman

Don't just dream about grandiose acts of doing good. Every day do small ones, that add up over time to positive patterns. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

Hillary Clinton worked with Marian Wright Edelman in Children's Defense Fund. That's all you need to do know. — Rush Limbaugh

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

It is utterly exhausting being Black in America - physically, mentally, and emotionally. While many minority groups and women feel similar stress, there is no respite or escape from your badge of color. — Marian Wright Edelman

I get very upset with all of the crowd seekers today, and people out there trying to get on TV. It ain't about you. It's about trying to make the world more just for everybody. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done. — Marian Wright Edelman

The key is that your children are aware that you love them a lot, and that you are there when they really, really need you. If a kid was ill, I would simply leave a meeting and go home. — Marian Wright Edelman

What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence ... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America. — Marian Wright Edelman

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

Luckily, I had incredible parents who, when they saw a problem, didn't say, "Why doesn't somebody do something?" They would say, "Why don't we do something?". — Marian Wright Edelman

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up? — Marian Wright Edelman

If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

I was taught that the world had a lot of problems; that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate; and that service is the rent each of us pays for living
the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reached your personal goals. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

It is [children] who are God's presence, promise and hope for mankind. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

It's time for greatness
not for greed. It's a time for idealism
not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action. — Marian Wright Edelman

Hope is the best contraceptive. — Marian Wright Edelman

I need to work outside government, on my own. — Marian Wright Edelman

People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that. — 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

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

Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am. — Marian Wright Edelman

You were born God's original. Try not to become someone's copy. — Marian Wright Edelman

Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year. — Marian Wright Edelman

Don't be afraid of hard work. — 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 teach us to be courageous and to stand up against injustice. — Marian Wright Edelman

It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans. — Marian Wright Edelman

There were these great women in Montgomery, [Rosa Louise] Parks was among them. Jo Ann Robinson [who organized the bus boycott] was among them. It's always these ordinary women and men of grace who have been waiting and seething and planning to change things that are unjust that bring movement. — Marian Wright Edelman

[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes]. — Marian Wright Edelman

Homeless shelters, child hunger, and child suffering have become normalized in the richest nation on earth. It's time to reset our moral compass and redefine how we measure success. — Marian Wright Edelman

Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved. — Marian Wright Edelman

Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore. — Marian Wright Edelman

Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them. — Marian Wright Edelman

God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one. — Marian Wright Edelman

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation. — Marian Wright Edelman

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose. — Marian Wright Edelman

I try to act out of faith. — Marian Wright Edelman

You have to have a fundamental change in the culture of policing, and who is the police person. How do they change? How do you learn from England and the other places, or Australia? In England, they don't carry guns on the whole. It's a different kind of mentality that does not demonize, and it's justified on race and income and class. — Marian Wright Edelman

Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence. — Marian Wright Edelman

Don't assume a door is closed; push on it. Don't assume if it was closed yesterday that it is closed today. Don't ever stop learning and improving your mind. If you do, you're going to be left behind. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad. — Marian Wright Edelman

Let all children come unto me. — Marian Wright Edelman

Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few. — Marian Wright Edelman

In politics, there are no friends. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions. — Marian Wright Edelman

Ordinary women of grace are, in a sense, my real role models. — Marian Wright Edelman

In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery. — Marian Wright Edelman

Democracy cannot breathe, indeed will die, if those enjoined to protect it and uphold the laws snuff it out - with no consequences. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

It really takes a community to raise children, no matter how much money one has. Nobody can do it well alone. And it's the bedrock security of community that we and our children need. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future. — Marian Wright Edelman

Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don't want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them. — Marian Wright Edelman

You'd better stay determined, because that's how our ancestors got us where we are. — Marian Wright Edelman

The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight ... — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

Children must have at least one person who believes in them. It could be a counselor, a teacher, a preacher, a friend. It could be you. You never know when a little love, a little support will plant a small seed of hope. — Marian Wright Edelman

That's not to say that some of the new media is not advantageous. You can reach lots of folks with what Black Lives Matter is doing, mobilizing people. God bless them. — Marian Wright Edelman

Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right. Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right. — 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

Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right. — Marian Wright Edelman

The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means. — Marian Wright Edelman

I hope that people of all faiths will start looking for our too-invisible children who are crying out for help ... — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

Don't count out Marian Wright Edelman, because there is talk that President Clinton may want to shock the nation by putting a real black on the Supreme Court. — Marian Wright Edelman

Our government has to be held accountable for enforcing the law. Tamir Rice, the fact that they could exonerate that police person [who killed him], and Tamir's family was charged for the ambulance to take him [to the hospital]. It's inhumane. — 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

It is so important not to let ourselves off the hook or to become apathetic or cynical by telling ourselves that nothing works or makes a difference. Every day, light your small candle ... The inaction and actions of many human beings over a long time contributed to the crises our children face, and it is the action and struggle of many human beings over time that will solve them-with God's help. So every day, light your small candle. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors.
Count on earning them by hard work
and perseverance. — Marian Wright Edelman

In my generation, we learned how to be leaders by being exposed to and involved with adults who empowered us and gave us a sense that we could choose things. We've let down the generations coming behind us and we are trying to re- establish that connection. — 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

[Martin Luther ] King didn't pick his leadership position. Most movements are not started by single people. — Marian Wright Edelman