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World War Ii Is Smothered In Sentimentality And Nostalgia. What's Interesting About Vietnam Is That Sentimentality Is Just Not There, So You're Given Kind Of A Clean Access To It In One Way. It's Also A War That Represents A Failure For The United States. Many People Came Back Feeling Like They Never Wanted To Talk About It Again. And So We Developed A National Amnesia.

-Ken Burns

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World War Ii Is

Ken Burns

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World War Ii Is Smothered In Sentimentality And Nostalgia. What's Interesting About Vietnam Is That Sentimentality Is Just Not There, So You're Given Kind Of A Clean Access To It In One Way. It's Also A War That Represents A Failure For The United States. Many People Came Back Feeling Like They Never Wanted To Talk About It Again. And So We Developed A National Amnesia.

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I Grew Up Certain For A While That I Was Going To Be An Anthropologist, Until Film Turned My Head.

I Never, Ever Want To Apologize For A Film. If It's Bad I'll Say It's My Fault. And That's What I Can Say So Far In All The Films That I've Done, That If You Don't Like It, It's Entirely My Fault.

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One Of The Things I Really Like About Ford's Films Is How There Is Always A Focus On The Way Characters Live, And Not Just The Male Heroes.

When You Are Editing, The Final Master Is Aristotle And His Poetics. You Might Have A Terrific Episode, But If People Are Falling Out Because There Are Just Too Many Elements In It, You Have To Begin To Get Rid Of Things.

History's Just Been Made For Sale To An Inside Deal.

I Am Passionately Interested In Understanding 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.

No One Was More Important To The Game Of Baseball In The Last Half Of The 20th Century Than Henry Aaron And No One Writes About That Supremely Talented Man, That Tumultuous Time And This Treasure Of A Game Better Than Howard Bryant. Together, They Are An Extraordinary Combination, And The Book Bryant Has Written Gets To The Heart Of The Complicated And Dignified, Patient And Consistent Genuine Hero That Is Henry Aaron.

We Strain To Listen To The Ghosts And Echoes Of Our Inexpressibly Wise Past, And We Have An Obligation To Maintain These Places, To Provide These Sanctuaries, So That People May Be In The Presence Of Forces Larger Than Those Of The Moment.

It Is The Great Arrogance Of The Present To Forget The Intelligence Of The Past

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I Enjoy Total Creative Control Right Now. Nobody Tells Me To Make It Longer, Shorter, Better, Sexier, More Violent, Whatever.

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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.

We All Think That An Exception Is Going To Be Made In Our Case And Were Going To Live Forever. Being A Human Is Actually Arriving At The Understanding That Thats Not Going To Be. Story Is There To Remind Us That Its Just Ok.

In A Sense I've Made The Same Film Over And Over Again. In All Of Them I've Asked, 'who Are We As Americans?

Good History Is A Question Of Survival. Without Any Past, We Will Deprive Ourselves Of The Defining Impression Of Our Being.

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I Think My Expectations For Myself Are Much More Severe And Much More Direct. You Can't Work On A Film For Six Years Without Being Your Own Toughest Critic. So You Can't Really Be Distracted By The Expectations Based On Your Previous Performance.

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