Norman Lear Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

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

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.