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The revolution starts at the bottom.

Yvon Chouinard

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Yvon Chouinard
Age: 85
Born: 1938
Born: November 9
Businessperson
Environmentalist
Mountaineer
Rock Climber
Lewiston
Maine
Starts
Bottom
Revolution

More quotes by Yvon Chouinard

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The more you know, the less you need.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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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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Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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I say the last 10 percent of the way to perfection takes so much of your life that it isn't worth the effort. This overzealous attitude is what creates religious fanatics, body Nazis, and athletes who are exceedingly dull to converse with.
Yvon Chouinard
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I think risk is important. I don't care if it's a great financial risk or a physical risk. You only get out of something what you put into it and the fact that you are willing to risk something means that you are going to get a lot more out of it.
Yvon Chouinard
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...it's the same with business. If you focus on the goal and not the process, you inevitably compromise. Businessmen who focus on profits wind up in the hole. For me, profit is what happens when you do everything else right.
Yvon Chouinard
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Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don't want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting.
Yvon Chouinard
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We're a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It's a selfish thing to want to protect nature.
Yvon Chouinard
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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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It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich otherwise you're just crazy.
Yvon Chouinard
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Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. If you keep your eyes open as you travel around, you realize we are destroying this planet.
Yvon Chouinard
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There's a movement for simplifying your life: purchase less stuff, own a few things that are very high quality that last a long time, and that are multifunctional.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks, I’m going to do my own thing.’
Yvon Chouinard
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Remember: if you take bivouac equipment along, you will bivouac.
Yvon Chouinard
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Personally, I would rather climb in the high mountains. I have always abhorred the tremendous heat, the dirt-filled cracks, the ant-covered foul-smelling trees and bushes which cover the cliffs, the filth and noise of Camp 4 (the climbers' campground), and worst of all, the multitudes of tourists which abound during the weekends and summer months.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard