Ken Burns > Quotes

“There is no communication in this world except between equals.”
― Ken Burns

“It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past”
― Ken Burns

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but human nature remains the same.”
― Ken Burns, The Vietnam War

“Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn't have to be a bridge-or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend. Do something that will last and be beautiful.”
― Ken Burns

“It's difficult to dispel arrogance if you retain ignorance.”
― Ken Burns, The Vietnam War

“From "Not For Ourselves Alone:"

In Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s time:


Women were barred by custom from the pulpit and professions

Those who spoke in public were thought indecent

Married women were prohibited from owning or inheriting property: in fact, wives were the property of their husbands, who were entitled by law to her wages and her body.

Women were prohibited from signing contracts

Women had no right to their children or even their clothing in a divorce

Women were not allowed to serve on juries and most were considered incompetent to testify.

Women were not allowed to VOTE.”
― ken burns

“Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all—not the car, not the TV, not the smartphone.”
― Ken Burns

“There's always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.”
― Ken Burns

“The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great challenge to which all our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget that--if we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history, our experiment--we forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider.”
― Ken Burns

“War is essentially dehumanising'.
'It's trying to portray your enemy as less human than you are'.”
― Ken Burns, Walking to Cold Mountain: A Journey Through Civil War America

“I am passionately interested in 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.”
― Ken Burns, The Civil War: An Illustrated History

“Jackie Robinson stole home and he's safe."...Nobody could hurt him again. He wouldn't hear the name-calling. He would only hear the cheers and somehow I could fantasize my own little story about where he was and how he was doing and let him rest in peace.”
― Ken Burns, Baseball

“The greatest unintended consequence of Prohibition however, was the plainest to see. For over a decade, the law that was meant to foster temperance instead fostered intemperance and excess.”
― Ken Burns

“Grief is a part of life and if you explore its painful precints, it will make you stronger.”
― Ken Burns

“27,000 businesses failed,”
― Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History

“Columbia University, idealistic, and so thoroughly a New Yorker that he had to learn how to drive a car in order to take the job. Prior”
― Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History

“IN MARCH 1936, ROBERT GEIGER, the Associated Press reporter who had given the Dust Bowl its”
― Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History

“blew out 5 million acres of fields, and in the space of a day carried off twice as much dirt as had been excavated by the United States in the decade it took to dig the Panama Canal.”
― Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History

“Grief is a part of life and if you explore its painful precincts, it will make you stronger.”
― Ken Burns

“750 years old, and during that time the Great Plains had suffered twenty droughts similar in severity to the one under way in the 1930s.)”
― Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History