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.

Once you educate yourself, you're left with choices.

Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward.

My favorite quote about entrepreneurship is that to understand an entrepreneur, you should study a juvenile delinquent. They're both saying: "This sucks and I'm going to do it another way." You have to want to break the rules and prove that your way works.

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.

Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person.

What they don't realize is that I'm not in the business to make clothes. I'm not in the business to make more money for myself, for Christ's sake. This is the reason Patagonia exists - to put into action the recommendations I read about in books to avoid environmental collapse. That's the reason I'm in business - to try to clean up our own act, and try to influence other companies to do the right thing, and try to influence our customers to do the right thing. So we're not going to change.