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

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

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

"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."

"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."
bottom of page