Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You were born God's original. Try not to become someone's copy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.

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.

Hope is the best contraceptive.

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

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

In politics, there are no friends.

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