Top 50 Ken Burns Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People tend to forget that the word “history” contains the word “story”.”

— Ken Burns

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past.”

— Ken Burns

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

— Ken Burns

4. “It’s difficult to dispel arrogance if you retain ignorance.”

— Ken Burns

5. “The only art form that Americans have created that’s recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.”

— Ken Burns

6. “History isn’t really about the past – settling old scores. It’s about defining the present and who we are.”

— Ken Burns

7. “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

8. “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

9. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but human nature remains the same.”

— Ken Burns

10. “There is no communication in this world except between equals.”

— Ken Burns

11. “The flame is not out, but it is flickering.”

— Ken Burns

12. “There are no ordinary lives.”

— Ken Burns

13. “I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can’t work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can’t really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.”

— Ken Burns

14. “There’s always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.”

— Ken Burns

15. “Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don’t believe that Miles sold out but I’m not in a position to say.”

— Ken Burns

16. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

17. “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.”

— Ken Burns

18. “It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.”

— Ken Burns

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Ken Burns

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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.”

— Ken Burns

26. “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.”

— Ken Burns

27. “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.”

— Ken Burns

28. “Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all – not the car, not the TV, not the smartphone.”

— Ken Burns

29. “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

30. “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

31. “I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.”

— Ken Burns

32. “A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.”

— Ken Burns

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

— Ken Burns

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

— Ken Burns

35. “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

36. “By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.”

— Ken Burns

37. “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.”

— Ken Burns

38. “I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn’t put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.”

— Ken Burns

Featured in: Reading Quotes

39. “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.”

— Ken Burns

40. “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

41. “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 Curt Flood.”

— Ken Burns

42. “I don’t use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.”

— Ken Burns

43. “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.”

— Ken Burns

44. “Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.”

— Ken Burns

45. “History’s just been made for sale to an inside deal.”

— Ken Burns

46. “I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.”

— Ken Burns

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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.”

— Ken Burns

50. “You don’t work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.”

— Ken Burns