Norman Lear famous quotes

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Success #Stress #Mean

If there is a reason to believe in God, it would be the Havana Leaf.
-- Norman Lear

#Believe #Would Be #Reason

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Happiness #Mean #Tiny

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.
-- Norman Lear

#People #Understanding #Use

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Thinking #People #Mind

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Caring #Average #People

... For all our alarm, it is clear that the religious right is responding to a real hunger in our society... a deep-seated yearning for stable values... When conservative Christian groups talk of failures in our educational system, the erosion of our moral standards, and the waste of young lives, they are addressing real and legitimate concerns... Among secularists, the aversion toward discussion of moral values, let alone religion, can reach absurd extremes.
-- Norman Lear

#Christian #Religious #Real

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Dad #Kids #Race

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Looks #Traffic #Terrible

In this nation, leadership is dollars.
-- Norman Lear

#Leadership #Dollars

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.
-- Norman Lear

#Issues #People #Care

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Father #Black #Males

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Leadership #Office #People

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

#Real #People #Ends

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

#People #Salary #Pay

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Good Times #Life Is #Cases

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

#Directors #Rating #Producers

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

#Doubt #Partisanship

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

#Laughing #Belly Laughs #Belly

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

#Country #Violence #Excess

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

#Air #Want #Curtains

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Humor #Men #Kind

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Stay Strong #Thinking #Long

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Strong #Careers #People

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Making A Difference #Desire #Needs

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Heart #Thinking #People

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

#Wise #Heart #People

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

#Sex #Demand #Violence

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Community #Might #Directors

Success is how you collect your minutes.
-- Norman Lear

#Success #Minutes

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

#Responsibility #Motherhood #Thinking

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.
-- Norman Lear

#Couple #Goes On #Television