112 Quotes by Norman Lear

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.