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Exlpore more Time quotes

"The future is what matters - because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present - like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot."

"There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist."

"Twelve minutes. I can give you that."

"We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words 'Too Late'."

"We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

"We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."
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