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. – Ken Burns
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. – Ken Burns
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. – Ken Burns
I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what were lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and its worse than fear – its active disengagement. – Ken Burns