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Is climbing, as a passion and as a sport, better off now than it was in the past? We can do harder climbs now in faster times - techniques are more refined and equipement more sophisticated - but are we really any better off?

Yvon Chouinard

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Yvon Chouinard
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: November 9
Businessperson
Environmentalist
Mountaineer
Rock Climber
Lewiston
Maine
Harder
Refined
Sports
Techniques
Passion
Climbs
Times
Sophisticated
Past
Climbing
Better
Sport
Really
Technique
Faster

More quotes by Yvon Chouinard

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The secret to happiness is to be working at your passion. If you want to be miserable, lead a desperate life like everybody else where they drag their asses to work everyday because they hate their job.
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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 most important thing is to get the fish in quickly and leave it in the water. Forget the hero pose.
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Hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things, as opposed to hiring clones from business schools who have been taught a codified way of doing business.
Yvon Chouinard
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Mastery... is to work toward simplicity replace complex technology with knowledge, hard work, and skill.
Yvon Chouinard
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The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world.
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Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It's the same with surfing.
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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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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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It's not an adventure until something goes wrong.
Yvon Chouinard
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The more I make the more I can give away.
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The climbing as a whole is not very esthetic or enjoyable it is merely difficult.
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I wanted to distance myself from those pasty faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I was going to become a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.
Yvon Chouinard
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There's no difference between a pessimist who says, Oh it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything. and an optimist who says, Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyways. Either way, nothing happens.
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Traveling is my form of self-education.
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Growth isn't central at all, because I'm trying to run this company as if it's going to be here a hundred years from now. And if you take where we are today and add 15% growth, like public companies need to have for their stock to stay up in value, I'd be a multi-trillion-dollar company in 40 years. Which is impossible, of course.
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Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward. Rather, returning to a simpler way allows us to regain our dignity, puts us in touch with the land, and makes us value human contact again.
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Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.
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You climb to the summit and there is nothing there.
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A real capitalist knows that $10 given today does a lot more good than $100 given 10 years from now.
Yvon Chouinard