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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
Something
Sojourn
Good
Ancestor

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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It is [children] who are God's presence, promise and hope for mankind.
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I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
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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.
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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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It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.
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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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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.
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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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Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.
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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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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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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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Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
Marian Wright Edelman