Quote

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

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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
Tragic
Failure
Divisible
Justice
Stems
America
Costly
Care
Distinguish
Children
Stem
Much
Tendency
People
Tendencies

More quotes by Marian Wright Edelman

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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.
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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Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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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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.
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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Service is the rent we pay for living.
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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Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.
Marian Wright Edelman
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In my generation, we learned how to be leaders by being exposed to and involved with adults who empowered us and gave us a sense that we could choose things. We've let down the generations coming behind us and we are trying to re- establish that connection.
Marian Wright Edelman
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I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
Marian Wright Edelman
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You have to have a fundamental change in the culture of policing, and who is the police person. How do they change? How do you learn from England and the other places, or Australia? In England, they don't carry guns on the whole. It's a different kind of mentality that does not demonize, and it's justified on race and income and class.
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.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Children under five are the poorest age group in America, and one in four infants, toddlers and preschoolers are poor during the years of greatest brain development.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Don't wait for, expect, or rely on favors. Count on earning them by hard work and perseverance.
Marian Wright Edelman
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People who don't vote have no call on political leaders!
Marian Wright Edelman
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It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Don't count out Marian Wright Edelman, because there is talk that President Clinton may want to shock the nation by putting a real black on the Supreme Court.
Marian Wright Edelman