• 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.
• There's ignorance in people who just don't know that we have a national child emergency. And there are a lot of people who are conveniently ignorant--they don't want to know.
• Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay -- it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.
• This slogan of ending welfare as we know it is not going to help the more than 70 percent of the poor who work every day. Wages have not kept pace with inflation and with changes in the structure of our economy. There are almost 38 million poor Americans, most of whom work, most of whom are white. So the way we play the race issue in these matters keeps a lot of folk of all colors in poverty.
• Parents have become so convinced educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
• Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
• Education is a precondition to survival in America today.
•
Question: Organization's like James Dobson's Focus on the Family tend to argue that child care, child welfare, is a family-first enterprise, whereas CDF wants to place child rearing in the hands of the government. How do you respond to those kinds of criticisms?
I wish they would do their homework. I wish they would read my book The Measure of Our Success. In these matters I believe in family above all. I believe in parents. I believe that most parents will do the best job they can. At CDF we always say that the most important thing we can do is support parenting and parents. But most of our public policies and private-sector policies make it harder rather than easier for parents to do their job. I favor parental choice. I was opposed to changes in the welfare system that would demand that mothers go out to work. -- 1998 interview, The Christian Century
• The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction? That's a government subsidy of families, yet we resent putting money directly into public housing. We take our deduction for dependent care yet resent putting money directly into child care. Common sense and necessity are beginning to erode old notions of the private invasion of family life, because so many families are in trouble. - 1993 interview, Psychology Today
• 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.
• No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.
• 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.
More About Marian Wright Edelman
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About These Quotes
Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection © Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2005. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.
Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Marian Wright Edelman Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/marian_edelman.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online sources including this page)
