Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

Every child in America deserves high-quality health care.

We have a moral obligation to get healthcare to people who need it.

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.

When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.

Leaving American disaster victims to languish is morally reprehensible and un-American.

When I was growing up, my parents took in foster children. From a young age, I learned that there are a lot of children in need.

When you have 25 percent of the city not being able to afford care, health becomes everyone's responsibility.... What is the moral responsibility of a hospital? Do you assure basic services for the many, or do you retain complex sophisticated services that tend to affect the relatively few?

If your baby is going to die and it doesn't have to, it shouldn't matter how much money you make.

Stopping TB requires a government program that functions every day of the year, and that's hard in certain parts of the world. And partly it's because of who tuberculosis affects: It tends to affect the poor and disenfranchised most.

There's so much stuff in America that is very shameful. It's stuff that I can't endorse, but I still perform there.

The world is rich enought today that the idea of millions of children dying of disease is unacceptable. We have the resouurces and know how to prevent this.

In our time, there are still many, like those in the Good Samaritan story, who being of the religious classes in that time, purposely crossed to the other side of the road, and passed by the injured and bleeding.

Is it not a grotesque civilization which sends missionaries across the sea to save the souls of the heathen, and yet permits conditions at home that debauch the children at our very doors?

We will be judged as a society and as a culture by how we treated our meanest and most vulnerable citizens. If we keep going the way we're going, we will be judged very, very harshly - and sooner, perhaps, than we think.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

In some countries, as many as 91 percent of women have no one at their side to assist them during labor and delivery.

There is an unwritten social rule now that you can harangue the wealthy to give money away, but you mustn't ask how the money was made. There are no galas celebrating the money people knew better than to seek. Charity begins after profit.

There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering.

It's indifference and ignorance that stops people from doing the right thing.

Your health shouldn't rely on pleas for kindness from strangers. We can and will do better.

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

Have you noticed that the meanest, shrillest, least compassionate and most heartless people who are well off and have all the medical coverage they'll ever need are seemingly sickened beyond cure by the notion that someone who literally cannot afford health care is somehow beneath contempt and must be vilified and humiliated?

'Whole Women's Health' made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

I have learnt a lot about the challenges children face - poverty, inequality and their difficulties in accessing basic services.