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.

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.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

Every American deserves to live in freedom, to have his or her privacy respected and a chance to go as far as their ability and effort will take them - regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or economic circumstances.

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

The thing is there have been American movies that are similar to Solaris, like Alien had a lot of things that are similar, although it's also got the horror element.

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.

The generic Canadian style of illustration is different from the generic American style.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.

And while the U.S. can never be 100 percent safe from a future strike, our government is working around the clock on measures to protect the American people.

All we're getting from the Democratic majority in Congress and from this White House is more bailouts, more spending, more planned stimulus, more deficits and debt, and the American people have had it.

Who cares about that stuff? This is America, not Jerusalem. I'm an American. Let Harry be a Jew.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

No one will burn out doing aerobic running. It is too much anaerobic running, which the American scholastic athletic system tends to put young athletes through, that burns them out.

I was on TV for almost sixteen weeks during American Idol. It's at the point now where it's old.

What I think we need to do to engage the American people in a conversation about entitlement reform is to have a bipartisan group of people who come together and put every solution on the table, every alternative on the table. And then we ought to engage in a long conversation with the American people so they understand the choices.

I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican-I'm an American, I'm a human.