Ken Burns Quotes

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's an active disengagement.

Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us."

History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.

I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.

The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.

There are no ordinary lives.

In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.

You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with.

I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?

I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.

Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.

Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.

I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.

It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.

You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

There is no communication in this world except between equals.

The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?