肯·伯恩斯(Ken Burns)，美国导演，制片人肯·伯恩斯是现代记录电影的非凡的导演，他以在PBS上的特别节目《内战》《棒球风云》《爵士乐》等而为世人所知。

　　基本信息：

　　性别: 男

　　星座: 狮子座

　　出生日期: 1953-07-29

　　出生地: 美国,纽约,布鲁克林

　　职业: 导演 / 制片 / 摄影 / 编剧 / 演员

　　更多外文名: Kenneth Lauren Burns (本名)

　　获奖情况：

　　2013年第28届独立精神奖最佳纪录片(提名)中央公园五罪犯

　　1986年第58届奥斯卡金像奖最佳纪录长片(提名)自由神像

　　1982年第54届奥斯卡金像奖最佳纪录长片(提名)Brooklyn Bridge

　　Ken Burns’ 2015 Commencement Address at Washington University in St. Louis

　　May 15, 2015

　　Chancellor Wrighton, members of the Board of Trustees and the Administration, distinguishedfaculty, Class of 1965, hard-working staff, my fellow honorees, proud and relieved parents, calmand serene grandparents, distracted but secretly pleased siblings, ladies and gentlemen, boys andgirls, graduating students, good morning. I am deeply honored that you have asked me here tosay a few words at this momentous occasion, that you might find what I have to say worthy ofyour attention on so important a day at this remarkable institution.

　　(http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTI2MjkwMDc2OA==.html?from=s1.8-1-1.2)

　　It had been my intention this morning to parcel out some good advice at the end of these remarks– the “goodness” of that being of course subjective in the extreme – but then I realized that this isthe land of Mark Twain, and I came to the conclusion that any commentary today ought to beframed in the sublime shadow of this quote of his: “It’s not that the world is full of fools, it’s justthat lightening isn’t distributed right.” … More on Mr. Twain later.

　　I am in the business of history. It is my job to try to discern some patterns and themes from thepast to help us interpret our dizzyingly confusing and sometimes dismaying present. Without aknowledge of that past, how can we possibly know where we are and, most important, where weare going? Over the years I’ve come to understand an important fact, I think: that we are notcondemned to repeat, as the cliché goes and we are fond of quoting, what we don’t remember.That’s a clever, even poetic phrase, but not even close to the truth. Nor are there cycles ofhistory, as the academic community periodically promotes. The Bible, Ecclesiastes to be specific,got it right, I think: “What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There isnothing new under the sun.”

　　What that means is that human nature never changes. Or almost never changes. We havecontinually superimposed our complex and contradictory nature over the random course ofhuman events. All of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, ourpuritanism and our prurience parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation.This often gives us the impression that history does repeat itself. It doesn’t. It just rhymes, MarkTwain is supposed to have said…but he didn’t (more on him later).

　　Over the many years of practicing, I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, acollection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up toa quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing. And eachgeneration rediscovers and re-examines that part of its past that gives its present, and mostimportant, its future new meaning, new possibilities and new power.

　　Listen. For most of the forty years I’ve been making historical documentaries, I have been hauntedand inspired by a handful of sentences from an extraordinary speech I came across early in myprofessional life by a neighbor of yours just up the road in Springfield, Illinois. In January of 1838,shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer, prone to bouts of debilitating depression,addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum. The topic that day was national security. “At what point shallwe expect the approach of danger?” he asked his audience. “…Shall we expect some transatlanticmilitary giant to step the Earth and crush us at a blow?” Then he answered his own question: “Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa … could not by force take a drink from the Ohio[River] or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years … If destruction be our lot,we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time,or die by suicide.” It is a stunning, remarkable statement.

　　That young man was, of course, Abraham Lincoln, and he would go on to preside over the closestthis country has ever come to near national suicide, our Civil War – fought over the meaning offreedom in America. And yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing and prescient words is afundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographical force-field two mighty oceansand two relatively benign neighbors north and south have provided for us since the British burnedthe White House in the War of 1812.

　　We have counted on Abraham Lincoln for more than a century and a half to get it right when theundertow in the tide of those human events has threatened to overwhelm and capsize us. Wealways come back to him for the kind of sustaining vision of why we Americans still agree tocohere, why unlike any other country on earth, we are still stitched together by words and, mostimportant, their dangerous progeny, ideas. We return to him for a sense of unity, conscience andnational purpose. To escape what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said is our problemtoday: “too much pluribus, not enough unum.”

　　It seems to me that Lincoln gave our fragile experiment a conscious shock that enabled it tooutgrow the monumental hypocrisy of slavery inherited at our founding and permitted us all, slaveowner as well as slave, to have literally, as he put it at Gettysburg, “a new birth of freedom.”