top of page
Exlpore more History quotes

"In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry 'Native passes' issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine."

"I'm going down in history with Star Trek. It's a great feeling."

"I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally."

"The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene."

"Everything will turn into a ruin, even your beliefs will turn into a ruin! There will be no more believers from your belief, there will be only the viewers around your belief, watching this belief of once upon a time, and now just a ruin!"

"I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past."

"Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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."
bottom of page