John Ratzenberger Quotations

The pollution they produce, market, sell, and show to billions around the world is at its core contemptuous of the country that gave them better lives than nearly 100 percent of everybody who's ever lived. And they pass that contempt along for everyone to see.

There are technologies you couldn't predict at all when I started.

To them, the real United States is just flyover country.

Two days later I got a call that they wanted to try out the character for seven episodes. Eleven years and 22 Emmys later, Cliff was still sitting at that bar.

They need to be re-supplied with energy, and that energy comes from asking not what your country can do for you, but from what you can do for your country.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

In L.A., though, people get off busses calling themselves actors, so many are really not professionals.

In showbiz, you've gotta surround yourself with real, down-home people. They'll keep you straight.

In fact, my son learned his first swear word from E.T. at age five. The way I look at it, E.T. stole a bit of my son's childhood.

So many actors have sheer guts, will, and determination; they just need some preparation.

I'm concerned about the insidious influence of the media's bad messages that undermine the lessons parents try to instill in their sons and daughters.

Hollywood has lost touch with their audience a long time ago.

After all, at end of the day, when you're breathing your last, it's not your producer, director, or cast mates by your bedside; it's your children. Keep that in mind.

I come from Bridgeport, Connecticut and have friends I grew up with there.

I have been raising money for the past 14 years for diabetes research.

On my visits back home, if they saw that I was getting a big head, they'd let me know right away.

You've got to write for your audience.

A farce, or slapstick humor, does well universally.

When I go to the garage to pick up my clubs, I clean the spider webs off.

You'll be tested every single day.

Calvin: I'm a genius, but I'm a misunderstood genius. Hobbes: What's misunderstood about you? Calvin: Nobody thinks I'm a genius. Corfu? It's just a poor man's Pensacola...

I'd never been to acting school, so I never thought I'd get this far.

I've turned down projects based on raunchiness before.

It appalls me that the people who decide what Americans will be watching on the tube have never been to the United States. Not the real United States.

So many people aren't ready for Hollywood - professionally or practically.

In L.A., though, people get off busses calling themselves actors, so many are really not professionals.

The last thing on my mind was to be an actor, but I had a crush on a cute girl in the drama department, so the best thing for me to do was audition, help out, do carpentry, whatever it took to get me on that project.

I always played a soldier, sailor, or policemen.

From what I can see, too many kids don't learn pride in their country anymore.

But from what I can see all around me today, that America is fading fast, if it's not already gone.

Before 1972, no actors got residuals. They just got paid. No residuals.

Diabetes affects my family. One of my kids is affected by it.

Sure, the comedians who swear or use scatological humor can get laughs, but they're uncomfortable laughs.

It was the last generation of writers [ the Cheers] that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.

There are times over different projects when I've asked the writers why people are swearing for no good reason. I tell them that it would be funnier if there weren't these swear words.

This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock--I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.

Find people who share your values, and you'll conquer the world together.