Marian Wright Edelman Quotes - Page 5

I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

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.

I try to be a person of faith.

Hope is the best contraceptive.

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

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

It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.

Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can't stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence.

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

Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.

Ordinary women of grace are, in a sense, my real role models.

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.

In politics, there are no friends.

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

As I contemplate the kind of future I want for children-my own and other people's-I believe we must look inward to God for guidance and strength and backward to draw on the values and legacies of our families, ancestors, and communities.

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.