Top 120 Marian Wright Edelman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

Featured in: Education Quotes

2. “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

3. “You just do it one step at a time.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

4. “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

5. “You really can change the world if you care enough.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

6. “If we don’t stand up for children, then we don’t stand for much.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

7. “Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

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

— Marian Wright Edelman

9. “We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

10. “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

11. “Children must have at least one person who believes in them. It could be a counselor, a teacher, a preacher, a friend. It could be you. You never know when a little love, a little support will plant a small seed of hope.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

12. “Don’t be afraid of hard work.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

13. “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.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

14. “Don’t feel entitled to anything you didn’t sweat and struggle for.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

15. “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

16. “No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

17. “You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

18. “Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

19. “No person has the right to rain on your dreams.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

Featured in: Rain Quotes

20. “Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

21. “Homeless shelters, child hunger, and child suffering have become normalized in the richest nation on earth. It’s time to reset our moral compass and redefine how we measure success.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

22. “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

23. “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

24. “We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

25. “Service is the rent we pay for living.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

26. “The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

27. “God, please help us remember that all the darkness in the world cannot snuff out the light of one little candle. Help us to keep lighting our little candles until a mighty torch of justice sweeps our nation and the world.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

28. “Never work just for money or for power. They won’t save your soul or help you sleep at night.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

29. “It’s time for greatness – not for greed. It’s a time for idealism – not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

30. “Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

31. “You were born God’s original. Try not to become someone’s copy.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

32. “Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right. Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

33. “Don’t just dream about grandiose acts of doing good. Every day do small ones, that add up over time to positive patterns.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

34. “The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people’s children.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

35. “Service is what life is all about.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

36. “Children teach us to be courageous and to stand up against injustice.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

37. “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

38. “A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back – but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

39. “God did not create two classes of children or human beings-only one.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

40. “Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

41. “The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren’t worth anything. But our parents said it wasn’t so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn’t so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

42. “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

43. “Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

44. “Democracy cannot breathe, indeed will die, if those enjoined to protect it and uphold the laws snuff it out – with no consequences.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

45. “In trying to make a big difference, don’t ignore the small daily differences we can make.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

46. “Let all children come unto me.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

47. “I hadn’t planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

48. “You can achieve much in life if you don’t mind doing the work and giving someone else the credit.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

49. “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.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

50. “When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people’s children, I’m doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found.”

— Marian Wright Edelman