Quotes from Ken Burns

History doesn't repeat itself, but human nature remains the same.

Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all—not the car, not the TV, not the smartphone.

It's difficult to dispel arrogance if you retain ignorance.

Jackie Robinson stole home and he's safe."...Nobody could hurt him again. He wouldn't hear the name-calling. He would only hear the cheers and somehow I could fantasize my own little story about where he was and how he was doing and let him rest in peace.

There's always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.

The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great challenge to which all our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget that--if we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history, our experiment--we forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider.

War is essentially dehumanising'. 'It's trying to portray your enemy as less human than you are'.

I am passionately interested in 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.

Columbia University, idealistic, and so thoroughly a New Yorker that he had to learn how to drive a car in order to take the job. Prior

750 years old, and during that time the Great Plains had suffered twenty droughts similar in severity to the one under way in the 1930s.)

blew out 5 million acres of fields, and in the space of a day carried off twice as much dirt as had been excavated by the United States in the decade it took to dig the Panama Canal.

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

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.

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.

One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.

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.

I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.