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.”
― Norman Lear

“The pessimist sees a pile of horseshit and thinks that’s all there is. The optimist thinks that if there is enough horseshit around, there must be a pony someplace.” And sometimes the plot in which we find ourselves requires us to become our own pony.”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“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, Even This I Get to Experience

“My life without books would be like my life without clothes-naked. Like everyone else, I know that books warm up a room, but they do much more than that. They warm up the soul.”
― Norman Lear

“own”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“instant of priceless”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“But as part of that greatest generation, I have to acknowledge how much more we had going for us that contributed to our Pearl Harbor response as compared to, say, this generation’s burst of patriotic fervor at 9/11, which petered out when a war that couldn’t be adequately explained—and has been overwhelmingly regretted—suddenly enveloped us.”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“Lancaster, Loretta”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“Just another version of you.”
― Norman Lear

“The lesson here, and through the years I’ve seen it repeated over and over again, is that a relatively small group of agitators, especially when convinced God is on their side, can move corporate America to quake with fear and make decisions in total disregard of the Constitution that protects against such decisions.”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“begun. Anyone who knows”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“stamping out the hot plate”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“I thought her very beautiful, but in no way a babe. She had all the parts and features that make for a babe, but put together, the hard edges vanished and a gentility and fineness took over—a touch of the noblewoman.”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion . . . for liberalism is not so much a party creed as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“I’d stabbed her in the heart,”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“new car. I saw him”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“sweeping the sidewalk in”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“but I started collecting in the early seventies.”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“We saluted the flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning (before the words “under God” were gratuitously added to it).”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience