Top 30 Norman Lear Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “When something is over, it is over...”

— Norman Lear

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

— Norman Lear

4. “Success is how you collect your minutes.”

— Norman Lear

5. “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

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

— Norman Lear

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

— Norman Lear

8. “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

9. “It was very important to me that Archie have a likable face, because the point of the character was to show that if bigotry and intolerance didn’t exist in the hearts and minds of the good people, the average people, it would not be the endemic problem it is in our society.”

— Norman Lear

10. “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

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

— Norman Lear

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.”

— Norman Lear

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

— Norman Lear

21. “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

22. “The American people may not be the best-educated, but they’re very wise at heart.”

— Norman Lear

23. “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

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

— Norman Lear

25. “The evidence seems clear that those business which actively serve their many constitutencies in creative, morally thoughtful ways also, over the long run, serve their shareholders best. Companies do, infact, do well by doing good.”

— Norman Lear

26. “When I want to entertain entertainers, I call Jason Randal!”

— Norman Lear

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.”

— Norman Lear

31. “In this nation, leadership is dollars.”

— Norman Lear

32. “You’re in the business – when you’re a writer, producer, director – to get ratings.”

— Norman Lear

33. “Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.”

— Norman Lear

34. “When we went on the air, I didn’t want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.”

— Norman Lear