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"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."
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"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

"But contrary to what some people seem to think, I was never a bully. I was just a hard man."

"Part of the early Who career was all about knocking people's confidences out."

"To people outside, they think, Gee, that's great. You get to go here and there. The other side of that is our expression, This is location, not vacation."

"I disagree with people who think you learn more from getting beat up than you do from winning."

"Saddam has committed many crimes against humanity and against his own people."

"The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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