Top 120 Marian Wright Edelman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Let all children come unto me.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

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

— Marian Wright Edelman

53. “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

54. “In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

55. “Education remains one of the black community’s most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

56. “In politics, there are no friends.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Hope is the best contraceptive.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

60. “History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

61. “No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

62. “I’m doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I’m really grateful to have something that I’m passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

63. “If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

64. “Whoever said anyone has the right to give up.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

65. “Education is a precondition to survival in America today.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

66. “Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

67. “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

68. “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.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

69. “Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

70. “Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don’t count on them.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

71. “When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn’t say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn’t have a mental or physical handicap. He said, Let all children come unto me.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

72. “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.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

73. “Pick a piece of the problem that you can help solve while trying to see how your piece fits into the broader social change puzzle.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

74. “I hope that people of all faiths will start looking for our too-invisible children who are crying out for help...”

— Marian Wright Edelman

75. “I was taught that the world had a lot of problems; that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate; and that service is the rent each of us pays for living – the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reached your personal goals.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

76. “Children don’t vote but adults who do must stand up and vote for them.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

77. “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

78. “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

79. “It is time for every one of us to roll up our sleeves and put ourselves at the top of our commitment list.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

80. “Ordinary women of grace are, in a sense, my real role models.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

81. “There are so many noises and pulls and competing demands in our lives that many of us never find out who we are. Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

82. “Together we can and must fight for justice for our children and protect them from draconian tax cuts and budget choices that threaten their survival, education and preparation for the future. If they are not ready for tomorrow, neither is America.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

83. “Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

84. “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

85. “Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

86. “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

87. “Children cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

88. “You’d better stay determined, because that’s how our ancestors got us where we are.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

89. “A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

90. “Our true remembrance to President Kennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinished work today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

91. “You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

92. “Why are guns the only unregulated consumer products in America? We regulate toy guns and teddy bears, but we do not regulate a product that kills 4,600 children a year.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

93. “If we think we have ours and don’t owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

94. “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.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

95. “If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

96. “Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

97. “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

98. “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

99. “The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.”

— Marian Wright Edelman

100. “We are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another.”

— Marian Wright Edelman