No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

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 movements.
Marian Wright Edelman

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.
Marian Wright Edelman

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.
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

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
Marian Wright Edelman

You really can change the world if you care enough.
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.
Marian Wright Edelman

Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

Our true remembrance to President Kennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinished work today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.
Marian Wright Edelman

I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

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.
Marian Wright Edelman

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.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

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.
Marian Wright Edelman

When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.
Marian Wright Edelman

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
Marian Wright Edelman

Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.
Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

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