Norman Lear Quotes

It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared - we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring - the more they cared, the harder they laughed.

The evidence seems clear that those business which actively serve their many constitutencies in creative, morally thoughtful ways also, over the long run, serve their shareholders best. Companies do, infact, do well by doing good.

Bud [Yorkin] was the kindest and dearest man, and one of the most talented directors there was.

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there.

The complete control of one party over everything - I would, I think, feel the same way if it were [the Democrats in charge]. It's not the American way.

Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.

I guess because the shows were activist in their own way - the marriage of my public activism and my career activism, you know - people understand me very well. They also understand there's a very strong bipartisan part in all of this.

That's a very hard thing to help the establishment know. We're still an establishment that thinks the average mentality is something like 13 years of age, that never forgot H.L. Mencken's notion that nobody lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. That's the horseshit the establishment has always lived with.

Bud [Yorkin] broke out big when he did 'The Fred Astaire Show' and won four Emmys. His wife at the time suggested that we team up. We got a lot of press in show business papers, and a number of offers...we eventually signed with Paramount Pictures. But I always like to say, his was the horse that we rode in on. That is my favorite recollection.

When I got married for the third time, and I had children from my other marriage there, that's what I said when it came time in the ceremony for me to say something. I said, "I'm grateful to everybody that participated, everybody that participated in my life that got me to this moment. And everything was dead-right because everything is right now."

I think somehow I got a sense of the foolishness of the human - my favorite phrase, the foolishness of the human condition.

I think for television generally, the question that often arises is, "Does television lead, or does it follow?" You know, does it lead the conversation, or culture, or does it follow what's going on? And I think it does both.

I wanted to meet Bob Hope, and I got to know him pretty well.

I looked at enough of American Idol in the first weeks, and they're all about humiliation. I listen to Rush Limbaugh because I find it so repulsive. There are people with a little less sophistication who watch a lot of it, because we allow things to appeal to our baser instincts. But at the same moment, give me a little choice, and I'll make a better decision, because I have that ability too. And so does everybody else.

Culturally, I think 'All in the Family' was universal enough to have good timing at any time.

I got a call from an agent to come to New York City, and write for the 'Ford Star Revue.' Because at the time there wasn't much 'national television'.

Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don't collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don't really mean anything.

When something is over, it is over.

We mocked that concept ['movies are better than ever'] by doing a sketch that was about a theater trying to get one customer to come in...and that customer was Jerry Lewis. It generated so much controversy that Dean [Martin] and Jerry [Lewis] had to apologize in a full page ad in Variety.

I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.

What happens at the average church or synagogue or mosque is that I don't know many priests or ministers or rabbis who say to their congregation, 'go home and talk about the religion at the kitchen table with your kids...talk about God, talk about what this is all about.' They say in general, come back on the weekend, we'll talk to you about it.

In one question you are expressing a world of opinion. Because it is you who thinks that America has been mistakenly starting these conflicts. I happen to agree with you, and I will repeat what your question suggested...we have mistakenly gotten into one fracas after another. Why we do that [United States has insisted on keeping up a string of enemies, and the wars associated with creating those enemies], I think it's because we're afraid to look in the mirror and understand who we are.

You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.

But you know, my dad called me the laziest white kid he ever met. When I screamed back at him that he was putting down a race of people to call me lazy, his answer was that's not what he was doing, and that I was also the dumbest white kid he ever met.

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.

I get a kick out of the fact that people will pick on the writers in California for being responsible for the content. The people seriously responsible for the content are the people who buy it.

Next up [new TV stars] was [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis on 'The Colgate Comedy Hour.'

The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.

As H.L. Mencken once said, 'nobody ever when broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.' Our show [All in the Family] countered that witticism. I think he was wrong.

I wanted to work with Bert Lahr [the 'Cowardly Lion' in 'The Wizard of Oz'], and I did.

I guess the story that best defines us [with Bud Yorkin] and our relationship goes back to the [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis show. The four stage managers on that show became major TV creators and directors - John Rich, Jack Smight, Arthur Penn and Bud Yorkin.

... For all our alarm, it is clear that the religious right is responding to a real hunger in our society... a deep-seated yearning for stable values... When conservative Christian groups talk of failures in our educational system, the erosion of our moral standards, and the waste of young lives, they are addressing real and legitimate concerns... Among secularists, the aversion toward discussion of moral values, let alone religion, can reach absurd extremes.

In the area we're discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings.

The movies had a slogan at the time, to distinguish themselves from TV, that said 'movies are better than ever.'