I've appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980.

There is a thin line between politics and theatricals.

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years.

I want to step up our voter-registration activities. Not every branch does it, and not all the time. I want them to go back and get out the vote because I want us to have a big impact on the Congressional elections this year.

You know, I come from six generations of college graduates.

I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia.

I do think that some of us began to realize that this was going to be a long struggle that was going to go on for decades, and you'd have to knuckle down. A lot of people in our generation did that. They didn't drop out and run away.

The First Amendment means everything to me.

The president of the branch in Atlanta was a pastor of a church, the Reverend Sam Williams, a wonderful guy. He was middle-class and fairly militant for the time and place.

As skills and energy became more of a demand, people who didn't have skills just got left behind, got shuttled to the side. Education didn't keep up with their promise. Education didn't prepare them for this new world. Jobs went overseas.

I've appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980.

Many are attracted to social service - the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service.

Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education.

The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.

Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action.

Griffin Bell later apologized to me for that decision.

Ever since I've become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person.

Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.

And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings.

But even at the height of these scandals, even at the time when our finances were at their worst, the NAACP branches - the grassroots - kept plugging away. They kept doing what they do, and they do it well.

I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.

You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybodys rights. That these rights are not divisible not something men have and women dont and so on.

The civil rights movement didnt begin in Montgomery and it didnt end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

Marriage is a civil right. If you don't want gay people to marry in your church, good for you. But you can't say they can't marry in your city.

Fortunately, I happened to go east at a time when live television was centered in New York.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

The young people look great on television. They're youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven't got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

Networks decide who will have a chance to do shows, but it is the viewers who make the final decision of who stays and who goes. I am very fortunate, in that the television viewers of our country have decided that Bob Barker can stay.

Twin Peaks was special because it was so groundbreaking. In the early '90s it really changed television a lot. A bunch of weird shows, like Northern Exposure, came on after that.

We're just dealing with the kind of warp and woof of television ratings.

I did I Love My Wife on Broadway in 1978, and then went into television land. Now things are starting to come together in the way I thought they might when I was a kid.

I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show?

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

I've directed a fair amount of television series - so I'm always trying to learn new things. One episode was all hand-held and I'm trying to get better at when you should do things and when you should just shut up and watch what the people are saying.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

I'd really been wanting to do a television series. I was looking for a comedy.

It gets kinda monotonous, but that's television. There are plus sides and down sides. The positive side is that you have steady work for nine months of the year for however many years your show is on TV,.

Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.

It is a significant acknowledgment that the way people are watching television is changing and the model is quickly changing.

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

Very often some of the religious miracle plays you see on television can be very corny, I find. And so simplistic.

I'm very wary of news on television.

Kennedy did not have to run the risk of having his ideas and his words shortened and adulterated by a correspondent. This was the television era, not only in campaigning, but in holding the presidency.

I've always just gone with the best role, and I don't care if it's in theater, film or television.

Bill Hanna and I owe an awful lot to television, but we both got our start and built the first phase of our partnership in the movies.