Yvon Chouinard

But I’m really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That’s what’s important.

Yvon Chouinard

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

Yvon Chouinard

Doing risk sport 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.

Yvon Chouinard

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.

Yvon Chouinard

Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.

Yvon Chouinard

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.

Yvon Chouinard

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.

Yvon Chouinard

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

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.

Yvon Chouinard

I don’t really believe that humans are evil; it is just that we are not very intelligent animals. No animal is so stupid as to foul its only nest, except humans.

Yvon Chouinard