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I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.

Marian Wright Edelman

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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
School
Wanted
Planned
Going
Russian
Hadn
Century
Study
Literature
Law

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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.
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Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.
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Hope is the best contraceptive.
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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?.
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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.
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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.
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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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The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.
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It is [children] who are God's presence, promise and hope for mankind.
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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.
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I don't care what my children choose to do professionally, just as long as within their choices they understand they've got to give something back.
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So often we think we have got to make a difference and be a big dog. Let us just try to be little fleas biting. Enough fleas biting strategically can make a big dog very uncomfortable.
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People want to pick the leader, and we are obsessed with celebrity and whoever is on the cover of this or that.
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As [Martin Luther] King said, it never cost anybody a dime to integrate the lunch counters. When you start talking about trying to deal with jobs and hunger and things that require investment, then that's really the tough stuff, because everybody wants to do right if it doesn't cost them anything.
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Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence.
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Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few.
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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.
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The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
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God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one.
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