Norman Lear
I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Happiness
In this nation, leadership is dollars.Collection: Leadership
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.
TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.
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.
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 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.
When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.
I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn't get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.
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.
We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which James, the father on Good Times, had hypertension.
Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.
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.
So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.
We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.
You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.
At great, great remove sit the head of General Electric, the head of News Corp, the head of Viacom, or the head of this giant international corporation that wants these ratings.
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.
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.
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.
The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.
There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end.
Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.
Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.
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.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Life
We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.Collection: Self
When something is over, it is over.Collection: Over It
Life is about having a good time.Collection: Good Times
Success is how you collect your minutes.Collection: Success
I like getting up in the morning, and I like better having something to do when I get up in the morning.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Thinking
I think if you're feeling great about where you are, everything that led up to it had to be terrific.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Lakes
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.Collection: Change
If there is a reason to believe in God, it would be the Havana Leaf.Collection: Believe
Power is the goal of religion in general.Collection: Goal
I think Americans have become a - much more a nation of consumers than citizens.Collection: Thinking
We all [Ed Simmons,Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis] started together, so there were no rules - anything we wrote became television.Collection: Together
'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.Collection: Fall
My dad called me meat head dead from the neck up.Collection: Dad
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.Collection: California
I started by writing, with my partner Ed Simmons, a monologue for Danny Thomas, that he performed at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Christian
Culturally, I think 'All in the Family' was universal enough to have good timing at any time.Collection: Thinking