[W]e are talking about a huge crisis... It's been all encompassing because in other crises usually there's one bit of the economy that goes wrong... Oil prices go up, collapses and so on, but this time... it's everything. It's about demand... production... the financial market... global supply chain... [A]s a result... the changes that we had to make... the kind of policies that governments have introduced to deal with this have been very very different and comprehensive compared to previous comparable crises.

At the beginning of the last two decades of our century, we find ourselves in a state of profound, world-wide crisis. It is a complex, multi-dimensional crisis whose facets touch every aspect of our lives – our health and livelihood, the quality of our environment and our social relationships, our economy, technology, and politics. It is a crisis of intellectual, moral, and spiritual dimensions; a crisis of a scale and urgency unprecedented in recorded human history. For the first time we have to face the very real threat of extinction of the human race and of all life on this planet.

A crisis is taking place in the contemporary world in a variety of forms, cutting across the realms of culture, ethics, politics, and so forth. At the ground of these problems is the fact that the essence of being human has turned into a question mark for humanity itself.

Often times of crisis are times of discovery, periods when we cannot maintain our old ways of doing things and enter into a steep learning curve. Sometimes it takes a crisis to initiate growth.

Shirk not these crises, hard and difficult though they may appear to be. Difficult they are. Forget not that the habit of confronting crises, is a long-established one within the consciousness of humanity. Man has the "habit of crisis", if I may so call it. They are only the points of examination as to the strength, purpose, purity and motive and the intent of the soul. They evoke confidence when surmounted, and produce greatly expanded vision. They foster compassion and understanding, for the pain and inner conflict they have engendered is never forgotten, for they draw upon the resources of the heart. They release the light of wisdom within the field of knowledge, and the world is thereby enriched. p. 477

Crisis is the portal to new opportunity.

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.

As soon as a crisis breaks out, within the given institutional framework, the same mistake will be made over and over again, on a larger and larger scale. Every future crisis will be bigger than the crisis that we had before.

Another strong force for change: crisis. All the failures of education, like a fever, signal a deep struggle for health.

The financial crisis caused tremendous pain, but it also made us reevaluate what’s most important in our lives — things that have nothing to do with money. It was a time to get back to basics, to the values that have sustained us through troubled times before. For me, it made me remember the days when I was sleeping in my car homeless and searching for a way to change my life. How did I do it? Books!

Change, opportunity, and responsibility. We’re living in a period of unprecedented change and unprecedented opportunity. Especially for the people in this room, unprecedented need for responsibility.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.

The world is at a crisis and we'll have to act collectively to change the crisis. It will call for a complete change of lifestyle and solidarity and for the development of our own resources because we are rich in natural resources. We should look at it from the point of integral ecology, so not only how much profit do we make but how does ecology effect the social structures.