Leadership Quote by Ken Salazar

Salazar’s line is a politician’s pocket-sized realism: blunt enough to sound like hard truth, flexible enough to justify almost anything. “Nothing in life” universalizes the claim, but the real work happens in the pivot to “nothing that we do” - a quiet shift from fate to policy. He’s not just observing that bad things can happen; he’s laying rhetorical groundwork for action under uncertainty, the kind elected officials must sell when the choice is never “safe” versus “dangerous,” but “which risk do you want to live with?”

The intent is defensive and permissive at once. Defensive, because it preemptively answers the inevitable outrage when a plan has costs: accidents, unintended consequences, political backlash. Permissive, because it reframes decision-making as risk management rather than moral purity. If zero risk is impossible, then opponents demanding perfect safety are cast as unserious, even unserveable.

Subtext: “Stop pretending your preferred option has no downside.” It’s also an invitation to trust institutional competence - that the state can weigh hazards and tradeoffs responsibly. That’s a big ask in modern American life, where “risk” is often code for whose communities absorb the danger and whose communities reap the benefits.

Contextually, Salazar’s career (Interior Secretary, senator) sits at the fault line of energy, land use, and environmental regulation - arenas where every choice carries visible, quantifiable peril. Drill, and you risk spills. Restrict drilling, and you risk jobs, prices, and politics. The sentence works because it sounds like humility while functioning as authorization: not a promise of safety, but a demand that we live in the real world and choose anyway.