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All Quotes by author - 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. "
News
General
Head
" 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. "
Humor
Experience
Women
" 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. "
Race
You
Doing
" Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play. "
Play
Continue
Even
" 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. "
Great
Community
Living
" 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
Marriage
Me
" 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. "
Will
People
Leadership
" In this nation, leadership is dollars. "
Dollars
Nation
Leadership
" 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. "
Stop
Traffic
Accidents
" 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. "
Caring
People
Minds
" I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins. "
Leadership
Responsibility
Think
" 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. "
Beginning
End
Play
" 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. "
Way
Television
See
" 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. "
Having A Good Time
Life
Time
" 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. "
Mean
Small
You
" 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. "
Minds
You
Think
" Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan. "
Activity
Doubts
Nobody
" Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs. "
Belly
Shows
Looking
" So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care. "
Causes
Made
People
" 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. "
People
Who
Think
" The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart. "
Wise
Very
People
" There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end. "
Family
Business
End
" TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary. "
People
Salary
Will
" We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition. "
Repetition
Violence
Country
" 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. "
Black
Show
Good
" 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. "
Say
Strong
You
" When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain. "
Air
Curtain
Want
" You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings. "
Director
Get
You
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