Skip to content

20th century Quote by Ken Burns

“Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.” quote by Ken Burns — Download Open image

“Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.”

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.1 out of 5 (9 ratings)

20th century American music Armstrong Century Important Important person Jazz Louis Armstrong Music Physics

More by Ken Burns

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Image

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.

Image

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

Image

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Image

The reason why you do history, and particularly why you do war, is that you want to make sure that in the next war,…

Image

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?

Image

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived.…

Image

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

Image

History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

Image

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to…

Image

It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

Image

“Jackie Robinson stole home and he's safe."...Nobody could hurt him again. He wouldn't hear the name-calling. He would only hear the cheers and somehow…

Image

Explore all 69 Ken Burns quotes

More 20th century quotes

I think the inhabitants of the past are fighting hard to keep the rents they acquired in the 20th century.

Image

Corporate America is a 20th-century dinosaur, trembling on the edge of extinction, and the only way for you to have a genuinely secure future…

Robert Kiyosaki

Image

America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce…

Image

The 20th century has been marked by cynicism, selfishness, greed, and the desire to please, all without changing the status quo. In the 21st…

Image

I've studied the lives of the 20th century's great businessmen and concluded self-confidence was instrumental in all their success.

Image

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

Image

The great wars of the 20th Century made it into the worst Century ever.

Stephen Ambrose

Image

That is very different from how it used to be in the 20th century. Media was very one way. There's a small little industry.…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Image

If you look back on the history of the 20th century, the 19th century or even to the ancien régime of the 18th, you…

Image

Up to the 20th century, we can say that this whole period was an Earth epoch, 'Earth' meaning the riches of the earth, simple…

Image

I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They…

Image

If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many…

Image

Browse all 626 20th century quotes