Quotes from William Strauss

World War II had marked "the supreme triumph of man in his long battle with the scarcities in nature." By

Authoritarian government isn't dead; it's just hibernating, poised to return in the Fourth Turning, rested and refreshed.

America, has fallen in the grip of the most portentous cycle in the history of mankind.

Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes.

Most Americans express more hope for their own prospects than for their children's—or the nation's

To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can't do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that's impossible unless we fix crime.

Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:

There is a mysterious cycle in human events," President Franklin Roosevelt observed in the depths of the Great Depression. "To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.

some historians now say there is no single history at all—just a multitude of histories, one for each region, language, family, industry, class, and race.

The next Fourth Turning—America's next rendezvous with destiny—will begin in roughly ten years and end in roughly thirty.

the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's what happened.

The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that's what happened.

The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan's mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now. Amid the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that's where we are.

We need to realize that without some notion of historical recurrence, no one can meaningfully discuss the past at all.

Mary McCarthy that "The happy ending is our national belief

Before, people prized the ability to divine nature's energy and use it. Today, we prize the ability to defy nature's energy and overcome it.

In America, as Mark Twain observed, nothing is older than our habit of calling everything new.

When Aristotle said that poetry is superior to history because history only tells us "what Alcibiades did or had done to him," he had in mind history as the mere compilation of facts. To matter, history has to do more. It has to reconnect people, in time, to what Aristotle called the "timeless forms" of nature.

Etymologically, the word time comes from tide—an ancient reference to the lunar cycle still retained in such expressions as "yuletide" and "good tidings.

America, as Mark Twain observed, nothing is older than our habit of calling everything new.

The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see," Winston Churchill once said.

During each of these previous Third Turnings, Americans felt as if they were drifting toward a cataclysm. And, as it turned out, they were. The 1760s were followed by the American Revolution, the 1850s by Civil War, the 1920s by the Great Depression and World War II. All these Unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new form.

or in the case of half-stroke cycles like the Kondratieff wave, half a human life).

Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. The first was the dominant view of primitive man, the second of ancient and traditional civilizations, and the third of the modern West, especially America.