Archie Bunker Quotes

your soul is like a compass, tells you where to go, but not how to get there

You're a chimp off the old block

In Bannon’s evaluation, Trump was Archie Bunker, but a really focused Archie Bunker.

After watching Donald Trump on C-Span the other day, one can see it being easy to be convinced that what the public sees, at least from the press coverage, is just a bit of “reality television” spilling over into real life. His performance at the gathering was reminiscent of what may have happened had Archie Bunker walked out of the cartoon world of the television sitcom and went to speak at posh affair filled with the wax museum of Washington politicos and the buzzard-esque scowls of the press. All eyes fixed on the performer giving yet another exhibition of theatrical prowess.

That openness meant those opposing the liberal consensus seemed out of step, people who would be left behind. The Archie Bunker types seemed to be a dying breed, and modern Americans could afford to be charitable toward them, just as they had been toward the Confederates whose ideology the modern Archie Bunkers shared.

The future is what's wrong with the world today. There's too much future and not enough past!

From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.* What began to happen in the seventies, and paved the way for what we see today, was a kind of strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy—away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually, towards the financial structure as a whole. __________ *Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that 'Obamacare' is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often both at the same time.

...asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers the question: "What's the difference?" Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. "What's the difference" did not ask for difference but means instead "I don't give a damn what the difference is.

The disarray of the convention seemed only to grow as the spectacle careened to a close. McGovern had trouble finding a vice-presidental nominee, finally settling on Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, a relative unknown. But the delegates then proceeded to advance thirty-nine additional candidates for the number two slot, including Mao Tse-tung, Archie Bunker, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Nixon's campaign manager.

Had he been a few years younger and lived a decade or two longer, Frawley would have been perfectly cast as lovable bigot Archie Bunker on All in the Family, the classic CBS sitcom that came to television in 1971.

Faith is something that you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe. Archie Bunker

But they could be frightening, too. “Watching Watergate in Archie Bunker Country,” said the cover of the June 18 issue of New York magazine. It began with the author, top-drawer trend journalist Gail Sheehy, recording what happened when the proprietor of Terry’s Bar in Astoria, Queens, asked his patrons if he might tune the bar’s TV to the hearings. Nine men cried “Forget it!” “The majority called for Popeye cartoons. But Terry couldn’t find a channel that wasn’t polluted with the ‘search for unvarnished truth.’ They had no choice. Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.” These ironworkers, sandhogs, elevator operators, and beer truck drivers said things like this: that Ted Kennedy “killed a broad” (“Now there was a mountain, and they made a molehill

Your own life starts the moment you're born. Before that, even." "I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won't... I'm not... It's like George Jefferson." "From the TV show?" "Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on 'All in the Family', he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker's story more interesting. He didn't have anything of his own. He didn't have a plot or supporting characters. I don't know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen... and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that's mine.

Queens College, from October 1947 till mid January 1948. One of the teachers invited us to his house, where we played bingo with him, his wife and young son. He wanted us to see a typical American family, in a typical Queens home, very modest even for 1947. These sophisticated people, sons and daughters of magnates and diplomats and bankers thought the environment so provincial, kind of Archie Bunker like.

I didn’t understand about alcoholism yet, how booze and drugs fed the wounded animal in Walter, I just thought that’s how life was. Unpredictable and insane. I’d show up to school the day after one of his episodes feeling shell-shocked and spaced out. I don’t know how I manifested this stuff outwardly, but I never talked to anyone about it. I just wandered around in a daze, stuck in a severe hangover. I had no idea how to deal with it. I was very conscious of the things I loved about my family—the freedom of all of us walking around the house naked, Walter being a musician, the amazing jazz I heard, the well-stocked book and record shelves, the bohemian aspects of our life. But I’d lie in bed at night and wish that I had a boring, normal, dumb family. One with no creativity. I wished my dad worked in a factory, and my mom was a conservative housewife who wore ugly pantsuits. I wished they’d have petty arguments and watch TV; the way Archie Bunker and Edith behaved on the TV show All in the Family, or like the Battaglias back in Larchmont. I equated creativity with insanity.

Don’t substitute. Carroll O’Connor, the late actor who played the role of Archie Bunker in the sitcom All in the Family, said that the problem for most people is that when they meet resistance in pursuit of their goals, they substitute easier goals rather than create better plans. When you meet resistance in pursuit of your goals (and you will), do not substitute easier goals; rather, create a more refined plan or work harder at the one you have.

He'd just sit on the couch, stretch out his long legs, and go on watching TV like an Appalachian Archie Bunker.