Quotes from Ken Burns

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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".

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.

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

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

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 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.

I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.

There are no ordinary lives.

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

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 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.

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.

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.

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

I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.

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

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.