Norman Lear

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“In this nation, leadership is dollars.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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