Neil Howe > Quotes

“the central thesis of this book: that social change in the modern world follows a strong cyclical dynamic.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Over the course of this book, I hope to persuade you of a more ancient yet also more optimistic doctrine: that our collective social life, as with so many rhythmic systems in nature, requires seasons of sudden change and radical uncertainty in order for us to thrive over time. Or, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal: History has reasons that reason knows nothing of.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“History never looks like history when you are living through it. —JOHN W. GARDNER”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“All our lives we remain a prisoner of the generation we belonged to at age twenty. —CHARLES AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Every Fourth Turning unleashes social forces that push the nation, before the era is over, into a great national challenge: a single urgent test or threat that will draw all other problems into it and require the extraordinary mobilization of most Americans. We don’t yet know what this challenge is. Historically, it has nearly always been connected to the outcome of a major war either between America and foreign powers, or between different groups within America, or both. War may not be inevitable. Yet even if it is not, the very survival of the nation will feel at stake. The challenge will require a degree of public engagement and sacrifice that few Americans today have experienced earlier in their lives. Remnants of the old social and policy order will disintegrate. And by the time the challenge is resolved, America will acquire a new collective identity with a new understanding of income, class, race, nation, and empire. For the rising generation of Millennials, the bonds of civic membership will strengthen, offering more to each citizen yet also requiring more from each citizen. In any case, sometime before the mid-2030s, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. The risk of catastrophe will be high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil conflict, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort—in other words, a total war—precisely because so much will seem to rest on the outcome.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“by the time the challenge is resolved, America will acquire a new collective identity with a new understanding of income, class, race, nation, and empire.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Generations also connect us to our families because they remind us that we all have forebearers who encountered this season of history at some phase of their lives. We may wonder how their location in history affected what happened to them as children, what happened to the children they raised, or what happened to alter the direction of their lives at a critical moment. We may be able to draw parallels between them and ourselves, our children, or our parents.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“One central purpose of this book is to make sense of these turnings by distilling them into a recognizable pattern. Another is to apply this method to the next few decades and describe some likely future scenarios for America and the world.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“The other words of counsel have to do with generations. This book suggests that generations are causal agents in history and that generational formation drives the pace and direction of social change in the modern world. Once people understand this, they are often tempted to judge one or another generation as “good” or “bad.” This temptation must be resisted.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“But there’s nothing complicated about how this dynamic can generate a regular long-term cycle of action and reaction, of innovation and compensation.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Yet most modern societies further stimulate generational consciousness by creating a special adolescent “borderline” phase of life between childhood and adulthood. This is when peer bonds are forged in a mighty youth-culture cauldron—a time when, as parents know full well (and as researchers confirm), peer pressure strongly competes with family influence. Modern adolescence stimulates strong peer bonding. And only through peer bonding does a generation acquire a sense of its own destiny. As Yale developmental psychiatrist John Schowalter puts it: “Going from child to adult, you go over a bridge of your peers.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“The first, financial crash, matches Americans’ worries about inadequate, insecure, and unfair income growth. These first arose in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The second, internal conflict, matches their worries about violent partisanship and the failure of democracy. These came to full awareness following Trump’s 2016 victory. The third, external conflict, matches their worries about foreign aggressor nations. These have been rising since the mid-2010s and jumped to full-threat status with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“The secret is to get out of the “shadow”—to escape the slavish habits and delusive hopes of “what we call our future”—and to recognize deeper patterns at work. At first glance, these deeper patterns may strike us as grim and unforgiving. Yet once we take time to reflect on them, we may come to a different conclusion: that they are corrective and restorative. They may even save us from our own best intentions.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“I must study politics and war,” he wrote, so that his sons could study science, architecture, and commerce—so that their children (Adams crossed out the word “sons” and wrote “children” for Abigail’s sake) could study painting, poetry, and the arts.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“In 2019, at the peak of the business cycle, a Republican president presided over the largest federal deficit in American history unprompted by either war or recession.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Children mirror one another’s dread, youths one another’s valor, midlifers one another’s tenacity, seniors one another’s wisdom.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Marcel Proust wrote that “what we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“If a generation’s shadow is two phases of life older (or younger), then a generation’s matching archetype is four phases of life older (or younger). The affinity between grandparent and grandchild is universal folk wisdom—as is the tension between parent and child. Lewis Mumford sums up the pattern nicely: “The commonest axiom of history is that every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”

What these archetypal myths illustrate is this: Your generation isn’t like the
generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation
that shaped the generation that shaped you. Or, put another way: Archetypes
do not create archetypes like themselves; instead, they create the shadows of
archetypes like themselves.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“The warrior does not wish to fight again himself and prejudices his son against war,” he observed, “but the grandsons are taught to think of war as romantic.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Peace makes plenty, plenty makes pride, Pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel brings war; War brings spoil, and spoil poverty, Poverty patience, and patience peace So peace brings war, and war brings peace. —JEAN DE MEUN (FL. 1280−1305)”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“The society that believes in cycles the least, America, has fallen into the grip of the most portentous cycle in the history of mankind.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Older generations have for decades exulted in their unconstrained personal growth and in a government that doesn’t ask much of them. They are very attached to “democracy,” a word which (to them) denotes an obstacle-prone vetocracy: Everything gets discussed, but nothing much happens. Gridlock, lobbies, regulatory review, and lawsuits ensure that comprehensive policy change always gets vetoed. The old, who benefit most from stasis, thereby keep what they have.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“However—and this must be emphasized—progress is not the purpose of the saeculum. If the saeculum has a purpose, it is rather to push a society that always anticipates something better into phases of creative self-adjustment where it must, from time to time, confront something worse. It is to steer a people resolved to avoid cycles into participating in a cycle that will spare it from dissolution or stasis and therefore from social death. The saeculum contributes to long-term progress only to the extent that it keeps society alive and adaptive. In this sense, its purpose resembles that of natural evolution: The saeculum may or may not make us better, but it does foster our survival. It may not give any generation what it wants. But, over time, it usually gives society what it needs so that more generations will follow.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“In any case, sometime before the mid-2030s, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“If the altered demographic profile of the two parties in the 2016 election—almost perfectly replicated in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections—is signaling America’s newest political realignment, it would be the first since the Nixon-Reagan elections of 1968 to 1980, roughly forty to fifty years earlier. By Walter Dean Burnham’s count (as we saw in Chapter 4), that would suggest America is now moving into its seventh party system.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“Forty years ago, religious anthropologist Anthony Wallace drew upon worldwide research to offer a suggestion. A “revitalization movement,” he wrote, is a “deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.” In origin, these movements are a collective response to “chronic, psychologically measurable stress.” When successful, they generate an entirely new “cultural mazeway,” a transformed understanding of “nature, society, culture, personality, and body image.” After categorizing such movements (as nativistic, revivalist, millenarian, messianic, and so forth), Wallace hypothesized that all of today’s established religions are the ossified remains of the “prophetic and ecstatic visions” of past revitalization movements.”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

“At first glance, these deeper patterns may strike us as grim and unforgiving. Yet once we take time to”
― Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End