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"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."
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"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 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."
"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."
"I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement."
"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."
"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."
"I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now."
"I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it."
"I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head."
"I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts."
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