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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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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
Going
Says
System
Alone
Child
Left
Kids
Unsafe
Care
Legacy
Children
Leave

More quotes by Marian Wright Edelman

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Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.
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Amidst protestations of 'Who can be against the children?' too few people are FOR children when it really matters.
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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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No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
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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.
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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.
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Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
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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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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.
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History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.
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Children don't vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.
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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.
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It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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.
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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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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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Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors. Count on earning them by hard work and perseverance.
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Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.
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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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Each American must remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.
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