In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad.
Marian Wright Edelman
Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am.
Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do.
No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
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.
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.
In politics, there are no friends.
You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.
You really can change the world if you care enough.
Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.
If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
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.
Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.
Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
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 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.
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.
The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people's children.
If things are too easy, life is a whole lot less interesting.
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
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.
Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?
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.
A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.
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.
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.
No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.
Education is a precondition to survival in America today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.
We have the capacity to make sure that every mother has pre-natal care. Yet, we don't do it. What is it about America? It says we don't value children and families. We are hypocrites.
Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
I need to work outside government, on my own.
It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.
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.
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.
Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.
Together we can and must fight for justice for our children and protect them from draconian tax cuts and budget choices that threaten their survival, education and preparation for the future. If they are not ready for tomorrow, neither is America.
Service is what life is all about.
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.
So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.
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.
There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage.
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.
