Marian Wright Edelman

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

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.

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

Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

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.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

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.

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

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

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

Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children and have been linked to low birth weight and birth defects, obesity, mental and physical health problems, and poorer educational outcomes.

The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be, our ideal of freedom and justice, how we were going to be different, and what the American experiment was going to be about.

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

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.

Don't be afraid of hard work.

We must not... ignore the small daily differences we can make which over time add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.