Norman Lear Quotes, Thoughts and Images

When something is over, it is over.

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

Success is how you collect your minutes.

Life is about having a good time.

I think if you're feeling great about where you are, everything that led up to it had to be terrific.

You know, you throw rocks in the lake and scientists will tell you you're raising the level of the lake, but all you get to see is the ripple.

I like getting up in the morning, and I like better having something to do when I get up in the morning.

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.

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

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.

Power is the goal of religion in general.

I think Americans have become a - much more a nation of consumers than citizens.

I never met who I really wanted to meet, and that was Charlie Chaplin.

My dad called me meat head dead from the neck up.

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

I started by writing, with my partner Ed Simmons, a monologue for Danny Thomas, that he performed at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles.

I think what's dangerous is 24 hours a day, 335 channels, or whatever the hell there is. Too much is too much.

Culturally, I think 'All in the Family' was universal enough to have good timing at any time.

I get a kick out of the fact that people will pick on the writers in California for being responsible for the content. The people seriously responsible for the content are the people who buy it.

Archie Bunker used to call me 'the laziest white kid he'd ever met.'

I don't know how you can look back with regret if you're at a moment when everything seems fine.

If there was a sense of - a bigger sense of responsibility in the various leadership positions in America, things would be not as grotesquely overly done as they are now.

We all [Ed Simmons,Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis] started together, so there were no rules - anything we wrote became television.

America is a country of excess.

The complete control of one party over everything - I would, I think, feel the same way if it were [the Democrats in charge]. It's not the American way.

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

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

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

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