Marian Wright Edelman

“Being considerate of others will take you and your children further in life than any college or professional degree.”

“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.”

“We must not... ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”

“Don't be afraid of hard work.”

“Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.”

“It's not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out where the strong man stumbled or where the doer of great deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actuall...”

“We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming mo...”

“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.”

“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 group...”

“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 thr...”

“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.”

“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.”

“Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.”

“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 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 popul...”

“It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.”

“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.”

“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 forese...”

“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.”

“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.”