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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

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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
Parents
Parent
Choices
Didn
Kind
Inherited
Parenthood
Choice

More quotes by Marian Wright Edelman

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Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
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There are levels of outrage, and there's a point at which you can't be trespassed upon anymore.
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We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.
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What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.
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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
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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
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We're a violent nation, and we need to confront it. This gun plague has to stop.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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
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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
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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
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Luckily, I had incredible parents who, when they saw a problem, didn't say, Why doesn't somebody do something? They would say, Why don't we do something?.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
Marian Wright Edelman
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If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.
Marian Wright Edelman
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We all need to get out of our safety zones too. In addition to voting, we need to embarrass people who don't do the right thing. It's going to take citizen action.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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
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You can achieve much in life if you don't mind doing the work and giving someone else the credit.
Marian Wright Edelman
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It is [children] who are God's presence, promise and hope for mankind.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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