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As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.

Jon Krakauer

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Jon Krakauer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 12
Explorer
Journalist
Mountaineer
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
People
Vocabulary
Cruel
Religion
Inciting
Evil
Inhumane
Force
Motivating
Means
Devout
May
Potent
Mean
Borrow

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Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.
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What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
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Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.
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It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.
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To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily.
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I think I understand that religious faith which makes the holy brave and strong my strength is just somewhere else--it's in myself...I do not fear what may await me, though I'm equally confident that nothing awaits.
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Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
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The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
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If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.
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The sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism - his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.
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I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.
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I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.
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Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies.
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I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.
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Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.
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But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.
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