Norman Lear Quotes

If there was a sense of - a bigger sense of responsibility in the various leadership positions in America, things would be not as grotesquely overly done as they are now.

Ed Simmons and I became stars in the emerging medium of television. We were new and fresh, just like TV at the time, so we automatically became 'THE' comedy writers for television.

I like getting up in the morning, and I like better having something to do when I get up in the morning.

We all [Ed Simmons,Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis] started together, so there were no rules - anything we wrote became television.

Success is how you collect your minutes.

You know, you throw rocks in the lake and scientists will tell you you're raising the level of the lake, but all you get to see is the ripple.

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.

Power is the goal of religion in general.

We had a Judeo-Christian ethic hanging around a couple thousand years that didn't help erase racism at all. So the notion of the little half-hour comedy changing things is something I think is silly.

I think that of most leaders in religion as power brokers. They give orders, in a sense, to an audience every week, and that's where the definition of God starts.

I wish I knew how we achieve the goal of world peace. My bumper sticker reads 'Just Another Version of You.' The sooner we agree that we're just other versions of each other - we human beings - the sooner we will find some sense of world peace.

I think if you're feeling great about where you are, everything that led up to it had to be terrific.

America is a country of excess.

In my 90-plus years, I have lived a multitude of lives.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

I stop and look at traffic accidents. I won't hang around, but when I hear something is terrible, as bad as it is, I've gotta look at it.

The establishment uses that rationale all the time, and that's why we do what we do. But leadership requires some understanding that you can say no. People have base instincts, but the transcendent also appeal to them.

I think what's dangerous is 24 hours a day, 335 channels, or whatever the hell there is. Too much is too much.

Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker - as I said earlier, you can't change people's minds, but you can get them to think.

Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.

I started by writing, with my partner Ed Simmons, a monologue for Danny Thomas, that he performed at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles.

If there is a reason to believe in God, it would be the Havana Leaf.

As a matter of fact, when people ask where my 'point of view' comes from, it was there in one of the first sketches we wrote for [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis.

I was the laziest white kid my dad ever met.

I don't know how you can look back with regret if you're at a moment when everything seems fine.

When I countered that Archie Bunker didn't have to put down a race of people to say that, he replied, 'and you're the dumbest white kid I've ever met.'

I think America, unfortunately, collectively thinks of itself as the 'chosen people.' To my knowledge, there are no chosen people, we are all human beings.

My dad called me meat head dead from the neck up.

There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end.

Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make.

We got ratings. It isn't that they won't quarrel with you, or say you're always right. But as long as you stay strong and the ratings are good and you're reasonable - I don't think we fought unreasonably. We basically won that right.

TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.

'All in the Family' took ten weeks to take off in 1971, and we were lucky to start in January, because if it had started in the regular fall season of 1970, I don't know if we would have lasted. The ratings didn't take off until the end of that fall season, when the other two networks ran out of fresh shows.

The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings.

I was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.

When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.

It seems to me that any full grown, mature adult would have a desire to be responsible, to help where he can in a world that needs so very much, that threatens us so very much.

Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.

Life is about having a good time.

We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.

The people responsible for the dollars that will buy the sex and violence so many deplore, don't even know what's going - well, of course they know. But they're comfortably ensconced in their country clubs and churches, and very far removed from the decisions that are made on their behalf.

Ratings translate into corporations, corporations that need a profit statement this quarter that's larger than the last.

I think Americans have become a - much more a nation of consumers than citizens.

Archie Bunker used to call me 'the laziest white kid he'd ever met.'

Life goes on pretty much the same way. I've been working on a couple of films on the side. You may see some more. You may even see another television show.

I never met who I really wanted to meet, and that was Charlie Chaplin.

Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything.