top of page
Exlpore more Work quotes

"The purpose of work is to labor and invest time in your gift."

"The people who have recently come to this country to work and better their lives should be given the same opportunities that our parents, grandparents, and ancestors were given."

"Bolts work on nuts; pens work on paper. But you must work on yourself. Go, get working!"

"Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this."

"The lessons of September 11 are that if we allow law enforcement to do their work free of political interference, if we give them adequate resources and modern technologies, we can protect our citizens without intruding on our liberties."
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."

"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."
bottom of page