Yvon Chouinard Quotes
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The whole purpose of climbing something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain. But if you compromise the process you’re an asshole when you start out and an asshole when you get back.
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Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.
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You have a whole life in the outdoors, you realize you have a sense of responsibility to protect these wild places.
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...it's always been difficult for us to lead an examined life as a corporation. I've always felt like a company has the responsibility to not wait for the government to tell it what to do, or to wait for the consumer to tell it what to do, but as soon as it finds out it's doing something wrong, stop doing it.
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The climbing as a whole is not very esthetic or enjoyable; it is merely difficult.
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Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.
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We choose to believe that the granite is alive. If life is movement, then rock - with its atoms flying around like stars in cosmos - is alive.
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Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person.
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Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to ‘have it all,’ the sooner it will die.
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No young kid growing up dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete or a forest ranger The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welchs of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values.
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Remember: if you take bivouac equipment along, you will bivouac.
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I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.
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I'm the company philosopher and the burr in the saddle. I'm the one who says we need to try harder, improve the quality of our products, become a part of the political process, help elect people who are good for the environment.
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I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!
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The revolution starts at the bottom.
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Nature doesn't like empires. It doesn't like accumulation in one place, it doesn't like monoculture. It's always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out. And we're constantly trying to hold everything in.
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We've teamed up with some Japanese companies to, basically by 2010, make all our clothing out of recycled and recyclable fibers. And we're going to accept ownership of our products from birth to birth. So if you buy a jacket from us, or a shirt ,or a pair of pants, when you're done with it, you can give it back to us and we'll make more shirts and pants out of it.
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I drive old cars, all my Patagonia clothes are years and years old, I hardly have anything new. I try to lead a very simple life. I am not a consumer of anything. And I much prefer sleeping on somebody's floor than in a motel room.
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During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.
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Hire extremely independent, intelligent, and passionate people, not necessarily "experts." Maybe three or four of my employees have MBAs, and those guys aren't necessarily at the top of the food chain.
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The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won't happen if you compromise away the entire process.
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The solution may be for a lot of the world's problems is to turn around and take a forward step. You can't just keep trying to make a flawed system work.
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The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong - that's when adventure starts.
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My favorite quote about entrepreneurship is that to understand an entrepreneur, you should study a juvenile delinquent. They're both saying: "This sucks and I'm going to do it another way." You have to want to break the rules and prove that your way works.