15 Quotes by Anthony Giddens

Religion provides a feeling that life is ultimately meaningful. It does so by explaining coherently and compellingly what transcends or overshadows everyday life,in ways that other aspects of culture (such as an educational system or a belief in democracy) cannot (Geertz,1973; Wuthnow, 1988).

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior... but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going.