Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn't get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.

You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

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

Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.

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 sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

And I also thought that Richard Nixon was the greatest political education we have ever had, but it looks like we need to relearn them again.

What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh.

It was accountability that Nixon feared.

I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs Nixon but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back.

Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.

I thought Nixon was the worst President we had ever had, save only perhaps Andrew Johnson.

The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal.

The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around, especially as President.

Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.

He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.

Even now there is no evidence that anyone involved in the Nixon operation was going to threaten us.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show... Cops would come by - often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

While he was president, it was popular to be a Nixon hater.

I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

The old Court you and I served so long will not be worthy of its traditions if Nixon can twist, turn and fashion If Nixon gets away with that, then Nixon makes the law as he goes along - not the Congress nor the courts.

The number of illegal activities were so large that one was bound to come out and lead to the uncovering of the others. Nixon was too willing to use the power of government to settle scores and get even with enemies.

I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book.