The risk climate of modernity is thus unsettling for everyone: no one escapes.

High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.

The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of actions in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction.

The difficulties of living in a secular risk culture are compounded by the importance of lifestyle choices.

The sustaining of life, in a bodily sense as well as in the sense of psychological health, is inherently subject to risk.

The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings.

The thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks.

The new mixed economy looks...for a synergy between public and private sectors.

Lifestyles are routined practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieux for encountering others but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity.

'Taking charge of one's life' involves risk, because it means confronting a diversity of open possibilities.

High-consequence risks have a distinctive quality. The more calamitous the hazards they involve, the less we have any real experience of what we risk: for if things 'go wrong', it is already too late.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

To a greater or lesser degree, the project of the self becomes translated into one of the possession of desired goods and the pursuit of artificially framed styles of life. (...) Not just lifestyles, but self-actualisation is packaged and distributed according to market criteria.

Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming 'I have a nightmare'

Risk concerns future happenings - as related to present practices - and the colonising of the future therefore opens up new settings of risk, some of which are institutionally organised.

Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.