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
People tend to forget that the word “history” contains the word “story”. – Ken Burns
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films. – 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