Marian Wright Edelman quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

In politics, there are no friends.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I've always hated being hemmed in or seeing anybody being hemmed in. Even when I was the smallest child, I couldn't bear being told I couldn't drink at a so-called white drinking fountain.

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

I need to work outside government, on my own.

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

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

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.

Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.

Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.

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

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 legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.

If it's wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it's wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.

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

The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.

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 one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

You really can change the world if you care enough.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given.

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.

Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.

Service is the rent we pay for living.

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.

God, please help us remember that all the darkness in the world cannot snuff out the light of one little candle. Help us to keep lighting our little candles until a mighty torch of justice sweeps our nation and the world.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

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

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.

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.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

I try to act out of faith.

Service is what life is all about.

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

[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].

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

As [Martin Luther] King said, it never cost anybody a dime to integrate the lunch counters. When you start talking about trying to deal with jobs and hunger and things that require investment, then that's really the tough stuff, because everybody wants to do right if it doesn't cost them anything.

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

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

Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.

Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.

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.

Children cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.

Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.

Children teach us to be courageous and to stand up against injustice.

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

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.

Don't be afraid of hard work.

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.

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

Dr. King used to say, 'I was sitting in the back of the bus, but my mind was always up front.' Don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it. You aim high and you work very hard and now I think it's clear that you can be anything you want to.

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.

Every child's life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.

Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up.

God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one.

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.

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.

Hope is the best contraceptive.

I also grew up with community co-parents who looked out for each other. They looked out for children and tried to be the hands of God. They tried to live their faith.

I don't care what my children choose to do professionally, just as long as within their choices they understand they've got to give something back.

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.

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

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

I need to work outside government, on my own,

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 be a person of faith.

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.

I wasn't thinking about history. I was thinking about how we were going to end segregation at lunch counters in Atlanta, Georgia.We would have never thought about making history, we just thought: Here is our chance to get out our sense of rejection at this kind of racial discrimination. I don't know that there was a time that anybody growing up in the South wasn't enraged about being segregated and being discriminated against.

I'd like to transform the system in very fundamental ways, but you've got to do that in every way that you can. You can't wait for some magic bullet or some magic politician or some magic anything to have that happen. You got to get out there and use your vote.

If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.

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

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.

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'm tough in the sense that I believe as strongly in what I'm doing as anybody else believes in what they are doing.

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.

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

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.

In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.

Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay - it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.

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

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

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.