Quotes from Yvon Chouinard

If you read a newspaper on any given day, you will see that most of the gains we are making as a society are still being done by activist citizens' organizations.

The competition always stayed close on our heels, but we managed to keep innovating and improving our products.

Rainbow trout live in the fastest currents, cutthroat trout in quiet eddies behind snags, brook trout in the pools at the inner bends of streams.

dyslexics often have a great sense of proportion. They make good sculptors.

For a dark stream bottom, use a dark fly; for a light stream bottom, use a light fly.

For faster or deeper water, use a big fly tied on a size 8 to 12 hook, and weight it heavily with tungsten bead heads and/ or nontoxic wire. For slower or shallower water, use a small fly tied on a size 12 to 16 hook and weighted only with a bead head or only with wire.

Cutthroat trout display behavior more like brook trout than their rainbow trout cousins. They are most often found in quiet current tongues along undercut banks, under rock ledges and deadfalls, and in slow, deep pools. The cutthroat is often easily fooled, and its curiosity about big, bushy flies with bright colors and tinsel is legendary. They like to chase their prey and are suckers for large, rubber-legged dry flies slapped on the water and twitched.

Brook trout are easy to fool, and are found in places on most rivers and streams that are easily reached: big pools, soft riffles, along undercuts, and under overhanging trees. Mostly though, they are found in soft, deep water, tend to feed lower down on the water column, and are less likely to take surface flies.

When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one. Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change.

Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist. —Kenneth Boulding

Yet despite the plethora of articles, books, films, and warning from scientists and even the military saying that global warming is the single biggest threat to the security of mankind—governments, businesses, and you and I continue to refuse to take meaningful steps to reverse the problem.

Buy less; buy better. Make fewer styles; design better.

Confessions of an Eco-Warrior

viewer has to be hit on the head with the same ad seven or eight times before it begins to register.

If we could all come to see our consumer products as tools that help us to live our real lives—rather than as substitutes and surrogates for that life—we would need many fewer products to be happy.

Patagonia's authenticity lies in not being concerned about having an image in the first place.

You climb the mountains or visit the wilderness but leave no trace of having been there.

Or as Dieter Rams, head of design at Braun, maintains, "Good design is as little design as possible.

Yes, wilderness for its own sake, without any need to justify it for human benefit.

Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.

How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.

You ask me about the past, you ask me about the future, the only way to be happy is to be living right now.

The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world.

At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.