MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

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.

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.

My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

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.

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.

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

I'm sure I am impatient sometimes. I sure do get angry sometimes. I think it's outrageous how hard it is to get this country to feed its children and to take care of its children, to give them a decent education.

We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

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.

I'm tough in the sense that I believe as strongly in what I'm doing as anybody else believes in what they are doing.

I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to.

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.

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

You really can change the world if you care enough.

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.

The key is that your children are aware that you love them a lot, and that you are there when they really, really need you. If a kid was ill, I would simply leave a meeting and go home.

I try to act out of faith.

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.

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.

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.