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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
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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
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Bennettsville
South Carolina
Life
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More quotes by 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
Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.
Marian Wright Edelman
Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
Marian Wright Edelman
It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.
Marian Wright Edelman
No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
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
I hope that people of all faiths will start looking for our too-invisible children who are crying out for help.
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 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
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
You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public, corporate, and private lives.
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
Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.
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
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
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
People who don't vote have no call on political leaders!
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
I get very upset with all of the crowd seekers today, and people out there trying to get on TV. It ain't about you. It's about trying to make the world more just for everybody.
Marian Wright Edelman
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 and the very dream that is America.
Marian Wright Edelman
