Quote

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

Ken Burns

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ken Burns
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 29
Actor
Cinematographer
Film Director
Film Producer
Manufacturer
Producer
Screenwriter
Brooklyn
New York
Kenneth Lauren Burns
Kenneth L. Burns
Kenneth Burns
Forget
Story
History
Stories
People
Contains
Tend
Word

More quotes by Ken Burns

Image
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
Ken Burns
Image
Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.
Ken Burns
Image
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.
Ken Burns
Image
History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
Ken Burns
Image
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.
Ken Burns
Image
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.
Ken Burns
Image
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.
Ken Burns
Image
Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.
Ken Burns
Image
Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn't have to be a bridge-or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend. Do something that will last and be beautiful.
Ken Burns
Image
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
Ken Burns
Image
I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing.
Ken Burns
Image
I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.
Ken Burns
Image
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
Ken Burns
Image
There are no ordinary lives.
Ken Burns
Image
We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.
Ken Burns
Image
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
Ken Burns
Image
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
Image
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
Ken Burns
Image
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
Ken Burns
Image
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
Ken Burns