Quotes from Marian Wright Edelman

Quotes from MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN who is a major contributor to the sector of Health and Well-Being in Early Childhood Field (U.S.A.) which recognizes that physical, psychological and environmental wellness impacts the development of children and their families.  Mrs. Edelman is the Founder of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) whose mission is to ensure that every child has a Healthy Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life.

• Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree. 
• When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people's children, I'm doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found.
• The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.
• 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.
• 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. 
• 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.