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"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."
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"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."

"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."

"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."

"Whatever good things people say of us, they tell us nothing new."

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
Explore more quotes by Norman Lear

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"At great, great remove sit the head of General Electric, the head of News Corp, the head of Viacom, or the head of this giant international corporation that wants these ratings."

"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."
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