Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
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Quotes by Marian Wright Edelman
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Marian Wright Edelman. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
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.
No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.
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.
Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.
If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
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.
You really can change the world if you care enough.
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