Norman Lear Quotes

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.

I wish I knew how we achieve the goal of world peace. My bumper sticker reads 'Just Another Version of You.' The sooner we agree that we're just other versions of each other - we human beings - the sooner we will find some sense of world peace.

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.

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

When something is over, it is over.

Life is about having a good time.

Success is how you collect your minutes.

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.

I think America, unfortunately, collectively thinks of itself as the 'chosen people.' To my knowledge, there are no chosen people, we are all human beings.

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.

I think for television generally, the question that often arises is, "Does television lead, or does it follow?" You know, does it lead the conversation, or culture, or does it follow what's going on? And I think it does both.

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

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.

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

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

Power is the goal of religion in general.

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

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.

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

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.

'All in the Family' took ten weeks to take off in 1971, and we were lucky to start in January, because if it had started in the regular fall season of 1970, I don't know if we would have lasted. The ratings didn't take off until the end of that fall season, when the other two networks ran out of fresh shows.

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