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

To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the ineveitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds.

The body is an object in which we are all privileged, or doomed, to dwell, the source of feelings of well-being and pleasure, but also the site of illnesses and strains. (...) [I]t is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity.

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

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.

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

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