Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Haggis

Haggis isn`t reaching for poetry here; he`s reaching for diagnosis. The repetition of "talk about" has the cadence of someone defending a project that risked being misread as merely dramatic, or merely political. It signals intent: to frame his work as a snapshot of a cultural mood rather than a single-issue statement. The key phrase is "where we are right now as a society" - not a policy critique, but an emotional weather report.

"Fear we all live in" does heavy lifting, and it`s a deliberately collective claim. In the post-9/11 media environment, fear became both a feeling and a product: a constant ticker of threat, a justification for surveillance, war, suspicion. By saying "we all", Haggis tries to collapse divisions - but the subtext is that fear doesn`t land evenly. After 9/11, some people were invited into a national unity narrative; others, especially Muslims and immigrants, were treated as walking question marks. The line glides over that asymmetry while still nodding to it with "how it`s affected us and the world", widening from private anxiety to global consequence.

As a director, Haggis is also making a case for storytelling as civic intervention. He`s positioning his film not as escapism but as a pressure test: what fear does to empathy, to how strangers read each other, to the speed with which we turn uncertainty into blame. The restraint of the wording is strategic - it leaves room for the audience to recognize themselves, then squirm.