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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

[C]ultivated risk-taking represents an 'experiment with trust' (in the sense of basic trust) which consequently has implications for an individual's self-identity. (...) In cultivated risk-taking, the encounter with danger and its resolution are bound up in the same activity, whereas in other consequential settings the payoff of chosen strategies may not be seen for years afterwards.