Quotes from Marian Wright Edelman

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.

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

Service is what life is all about.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

In politics, there are no friends.

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.

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.

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.

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.

I try to act out of faith.