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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
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Ken Burns
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 29
Actor
Cinematographer
Film Director
Film Producer
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Producer
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Brooklyn
New York
Kenneth Lauren Burns
Kenneth L. Burns
Kenneth Burns
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Americans
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Film
More quotes by Ken Burns
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
Ken Burns
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
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
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
Ken Burns
People tend to forget that the word history contains the word story.
Ken Burns
There are no ordinary lives.
Ken Burns
We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and were going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that thats not going to be. Story is there to remind us that its just OK.
Ken Burns
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.
Ken Burns
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
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
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
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
Ken Burns
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
Ken Burns
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
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.
Ken Burns
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.
Ken Burns
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
Ken Burns
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.
Ken Burns
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
I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
Ken Burns