Quotes by Marian Edelman

• 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.
• Service is what life is all about.
• 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.
• The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.
• The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.
• 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.
• We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.
• 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.
• Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
• You really can change the world if you care enough.
• 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.
• People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.
• Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
• No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
• No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.
• Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
• 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.
• Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
• 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.
• 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.
• If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
• 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.
• 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.
• Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.
• Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
• Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?
• We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
• You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.