When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
Ken BurnsRead
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
Interpretation
What this quote means
History is essential for understanding ourselves and our identity.
In this quote, Ken Burns emphasizes the importance of history in shaping our identity and existence. He suggests that without knowledge of our past, we risk losing a sense of who we are and miss out on the lessons that history offers, which are crucial for our survival and understanding of the human experience.
Themes
HistoryIdentitySurvivalPastMemory
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the importance of cultural heritage, this quote can highlight the significance of understanding history.
More from Ken Burns
All quotes βI 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 BurnsRead
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
Ken BurnsRead
In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.
Ken BurnsRead
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
Ken BurnsRead
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
Ken BurnsRead
Similar quotes
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Zbigniew BrzezinskiRead
The men who founded and governed Massachusetts and Connecticut took themselves so seriously that they kept track of everything they did for the benefit of posterity and hoarded their papers so carefully that the whole history of the United States, recounted mainly by their descendants, has often appeared to be the history of New England writ large.
Edmund MorganRead
It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.
Winston ChurchillRead
We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village.
Moshe DayanRead
Men make history, not the other way around.
Harry S. TrumanRead
I was 21 and looking for work in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression. And I can remember one bleak night in the thirties when my father learned on Christmas Eve that he'd lost his job. To be young in my generation was to feel that your future had been mortgaged out from under you, and that's a tragic mistake we must never allow our leaders to make again.
Ronald ReaganRead