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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
Value
Stand
Values
Earth
Something
Sojourn
Good
Ancestor
Add
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More quotes by Marian Wright Edelman

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When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.
Marian Wright Edelman
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We're a violent nation, and we need to confront it. This gun plague has to stop.
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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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The crisis of children having children has been eclipsed by the greater crisis of children killing children.
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The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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.
Marian Wright Edelman
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It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.
Marian Wright Edelman
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Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.
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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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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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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No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.
Marian Wright Edelman
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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.
Marian Wright Edelman
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I try to be a person of faith.
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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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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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.
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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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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Amidst protestations of 'Who can be against the children?' too few people are FOR children when it really matters.
Marian Wright Edelman