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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

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Ken Burns
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 29
Actor
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Brooklyn
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Kenneth Lauren Burns
Kenneth L. Burns
Kenneth Burns
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More quotes by Ken Burns

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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.
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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.
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You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
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There are no ordinary lives.
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Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
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By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
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I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.
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I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
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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.
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A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
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I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and theres a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.
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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.
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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.
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History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
Ken Burns
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Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
Ken Burns
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History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
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When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.
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I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
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It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
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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