110+ Marian Wright Edelman Quotes On Education, Justice And Social Justice

Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist and leader in the children's rights movement. She is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, a non-profit organization that has advocated for children's rights for over 40 years. Edelman is a civil rights activist and has worked tirelessly to ensure access to education, health care, and other basic human rights for all children. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Marian Wright Edelman on education, justice, leadership.

Top 10 Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

1. 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.
2. Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
3. You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.
4. The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.
5. 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.
6. Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.
7. No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
8. Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.
9. Don't just dream about grandiose acts of doing good. Every day do small ones, that add up over time to positive patterns.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.
• Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
• You just do it one step at a time.
• You really can change the world if you care enough.
• Don't be afraid of hard work.
• We're a violent nation, and we need to confront it. This gun plague has to stop.
• Democracy is not a spectator sport.
• No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.
• There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.
• In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.

Marian Wright Edelman Quotes About Education

Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

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. — 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

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

Marian Wright Edelman Quotes About Justice

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

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

So much of America's tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people's children--as if justice were divisible. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

Marian Wright Edelman Quotes About People

People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

There are so many noises and pulls and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — 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

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. — 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

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

Marian Wright Edelman Quotes About Children

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

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 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

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

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

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

The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction — Marian Wright Edelman

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

The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to. — Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman Quotes About Life

Service is the rent we pay for living. — Marian Wright Edelman

Service is what life is all about. — Marian Wright Edelman

You can achieve much in life if you don't mind doing the work and giving someone else the credit. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it. — Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman Quotes About Parents

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

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves. — Marian Wright Edelman

When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, Let all children come unto me. — 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

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

You are in charge of your own attitude whatever others do or circumstances you face. The only person you can control is yourself...worry more about your attitude than your aptitude or lineage. — Marian Wright Edelman

We are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another. — 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'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

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. — 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

There comes a time when you roll up your sleeves and put yourself at the top of your commitment list. — 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

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 literacy level at Mississippi prisons? Fifth grade. Can't read, what are you going to do? If you've got a conviction rap, what are you going to do? It's a real crisis. — 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

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

It is time for every one of us to roll up our sleeves and put ourselves at the top of our commitment list. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. We've got to send messages to our kids about what is important. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

We're spending, on average, three times more for prison than for public-school pupils. That's the dumbest investment policy. It doesn't make us safer. — 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

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. The world wasn't so wonderful back then, with segregated rule in the South. But we were never hopeless and we never despaired because we had adults out there struggling with us, being there for us, and buffering us. — Marian Wright Edelman

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes. — 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'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. — Marian Wright Edelman

Hope is the best contraceptive. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

People who don't vote have no call on political leaders! — Marian Wright Edelman

When I started out as an activist, the issues were much clearer. There's advantage to the new media, but on the other hand, you miss the ability to frame an issue that you had when there were just three TV networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. So the whole world could see the same police dogs. The same Bull Connor and his white tank. Now you've got narrow-casting. The media is all fragmented. It's so hard to get people to focus in a sustained way. — 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

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

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

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children. — Marian Wright Edelman

Never work just for money. Money alone won't save your soul or build a decent family life or help you sleep at night. We're the richest nation on Earth, with the highest number of imprisoned people in the world. Our drug addictions and child poverty are among the highest in the industrialized world. So don't ever confuse wealth or fame with character. — Marian Wright Edelman

None of the candidates are ever perfect, ok? Then you have to get them in there and you have to hold them accountable. You have to make noises. — Marian Wright Edelman

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

I try to be a person of faith. — 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

Whoever said anyone has the right to give up. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

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

You can't be what you can't see. — 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

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

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

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 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 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

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. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

Life Lessons by Marian Wright Edelman

Marian Wright Edelman was an American activist who dedicated her life to children's rights. She taught us to stand up for what we believe in and to never give up. Her life serves as an example of how we can use our voices to make a difference in the world.