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Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

Marian Wright Edelman

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Marian Wright Edelman
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: June 6
Activist
Lawyer
Writer
Bennettsville
South Carolina
Add
Bigger
Value
Stand
Values
Earth
Sojourn
Something
Good
Ancestor

More quotes by 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.
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Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up.
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I get very upset with all of the crowd seekers today, and people out there trying to get on TV. It ain't about you. It's about trying to make the world more just for everybody.
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If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.
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No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.
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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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The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
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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.
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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.
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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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It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.
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It really takes a community to raise children, no matter how much money one has. Nobody can do it well alone. And it's the bedrock security of community that we and our children need.
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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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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.
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It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.
Marian Wright Edelman
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As I contemplate the kind of future I want for children-my own and other people's-I believe we must look inward to God for guidance and strength and backward to draw on the values and legacies of our families, ancestors, and communities.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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.
Marian Wright Edelman
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[Martin Luther ] King didn't pick his leadership position. Most movements are not started by single people.
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Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.
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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