"In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?"

Identity, Americans, Film, Sense

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"In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?"

Exlpore more Identity quotes

"Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

Identity, Memory, Past, Truth

"Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better."

Winston Churchill, English Statesman

Identity, Church, Army, Day

"Maybe I'd always been broken and dark inside. Maybe someone who've been born whole and good would have put down the ash dagger and embraced death rather than what lay before me."

Sarah J. Maas, American Novelist

Identity, Darkness, Death, Mental

"The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent."

bell hooks, American Critic

Identity, Violence, Adolescence, Emotion

"Each of us has no peers, because each of us is unique in who we are and what we have experienced.Anyone who tells you otherwise has quite obviously not met any of their peers either!"

Anthony T. Hincks, British Writer

Identity, Individual, Experience, Self

"She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog."

Stephen King, American Author

Identity, Truth, Emotion, Wisdom, Power

"As I think of myself, so I shall be."

Vironika Tugaleva, Ukrainian Author

Identity, Self, Thought, Perception

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

David Levithan, American Author

Identity, Connection, Desire, Defiance

"No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice."

Ayn Rand, Russian Writer

Identity, Memory, Life, Editing, Truth

"I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes."

Maya Angelou, American Poet

Identity, Writer, Expression, Self

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."

Family

"You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches."

Work

"History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions."

History

"I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever."

Control

"The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts."

Genius

"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."

Life

"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."

Mistake

"Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America."

Society

"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."

Music

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

Time