Ken Burns Quotes

"[Sometimes, for example, we assume the people hearing us don't know anything. I've read a commentator saying that the new] Jazz ... OK, we got that part, move on."
-Ken Burns

"OK, I'm going with Altman."
-Ken Burns

"This is what I don't understand, why we're not taught this. I mean, you would be hard pressed to say that there was no machine more important than the car in the last 100 years. Nothing has been more influential in how we live, how we work, what's worked itself into our songs, into our mythology. The idea of a road trip is very much in everyone's life, and this is the first road trip."
-Ken Burns

"Impossible to imagine what we would have been like without it."
-Ken Burns

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

"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."
-Ken Burns

"Oh, I'm just sitting here dying about it."
-Ken Burns