Ken Burns Quotes

History is simply man’s desperate bid to give substance to his most visionary dreams.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

Revolutions are always the deepest memories of a people

History is a novel whose author is the people.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some weight to the hidden private life of ordinary people

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

I like stories where normal people are in abnormal situations, and that's what appeals to me about history.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied.

I was always pretty interested in my history. Not just the history of the Caribbean, the history of my people, but all walks of life.

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

I feel like history is about going and discovering the great human stories that just are every bit as relevant as anything that's going on today.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

History is very much bound up in family experience.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.