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Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.Marian Wright Edelman
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You really can change the world if you care enough.Marian Wright Edelman
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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
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Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.Marian Wright Edelman
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I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given. Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself. .Marian Wright Edelman
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If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And 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
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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
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Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.Marian Wright Edelman
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Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given.Marian Wright Edelman
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Being considerate of others will take you and your children further in life than any college or professional degree.Marian Wright Edelman
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Service to others is the rent you pay for living on this planet.Marian Wright Edelman
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The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.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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We must not... ignore the small daily differences we can make which over time add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.Marian Wright Edelman
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Don't be afraid of hard work.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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Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.Marian Wright Edelman
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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.Marian Wright Edelman
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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.Marian Wright Edelman
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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
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We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.Marian Wright Edelman
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Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.Marian Wright Edelman
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Education is a precondition to survival in America today.Marian Wright Edelman
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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
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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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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.Marian Wright Edelman
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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.Marian Wright Edelman
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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