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I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.

Marian Wright Edelman

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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
Really
Serving
Think
Passionate
Thinking
Grateful
Purpose
Earth
Important
Work
Something
Profoundly

More quotes by Marian Wright Edelman

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In politics, there are no friends.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
Marian Wright Edelman
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We have the capacity to make sure that every mother has pre-natal care. Yet, we don't do it. What is it about America? It says we don't value children and families. We are hypocrites.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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.
Marian Wright Edelman
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You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.
Marian Wright Edelman
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It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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
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In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.
Marian Wright Edelman
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That's not to say that some of the new media is not advantageous. You can reach lots of folks with what Black Lives Matter is doing, mobilizing people. God bless them.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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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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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Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right. Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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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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
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Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year.
Marian Wright Edelman
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We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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
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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
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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
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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