top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more History quotes
"There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body."
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
"Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself."
"There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said."
"And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns
"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."
"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."
"One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes."
"The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts."
"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."
"Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl."
"In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel."
"I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance."
"You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time."
bottom of page