More - Ken Burns Quotes

[Sometimes, for example, we assume the people hearing us don't know anything. I've read a commentator saying that the new] Jazz ... OK, we got that part, move on.

Ken Burns

 Example

We want them to stop the current arrangement, share it with the public and hold hearings.

Ken Burns

 

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

Ken Burns

 American Director History

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 active disengagement.

Ken Burns

 American Director Choices

This is what I don't understand, why we're not taught this. I mean, you would be hard pressed to say that there was no machine more important than the car in the last 100 years. Nothing has been more influential in how we live, how we work, what's worked itself into our songs, into our mythology. The idea of a road trip is very much in everyone's life, and this is the first road trip.

Ken Burns

 

impossible to imagine what we would have been like without it.

Ken Burns

 

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?

Ken Burns

 American Director

OK, I'm going with Altman,

Ken Burns

 

Oh, I'm just sitting here dying about it,

Ken Burns

 

The Civil War.

Ken Burns

 War