Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

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.

Laws are often made to express collective ethical principles, to establish a climate of opinion …

I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant; individual responsibility and community. I do not see those as being mutually inconsistent.

I'm tired of people thinking that Libertarians don't have morality- that they don't have values. that's a lot of hogwash. Libertarians are the ONLY politicians with values.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

We can't talk about community values without being prepared to invest in those very same communities.

For too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things

If we leave our values at the door, we give up some of the moral glue that has held our country together

Civilization depends on morality.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

Kindness and compassion aren't political qualities even though they get politicized.

I'm losing the definition now of politics. I sort of don't know what that is anymore. People say politically correct, I don't know what that means. I know what they think they mean.

There's a lot of people that don't understand liberalism, there are a lot of people that I think, by definition, still need to be informed and educated that it isn't the soft, loving, compassionate stuff that it's portrayed to be. Trump speaks for himself. Who Trump is and what he's doing is not a mystery to anybody. It's the exact opposite of a mystery. It's in your face.

I think all we should legislate is morality.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.

I'm not like a politician that goes around talking about family values. And I can't get fired from being a funny person because I did something that most people are disapproving of. I think people are just obsessed with this morality that people perceive as being the right and wrong way of doing stuff.

People tend to think of overweight and obesity as strictly a personal matter, but there is much that communities can and should do to address these problems.

I've got confidence that most people in America still have a decent sense of manners, propriety, morality.

Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.

Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion. Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.