Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.'

I do have a Viking axe by the bed if I need to whack someone... My wife bought me a Viking axe - the axe side curls down so you can grab the adversary around the neck and you can use it to climb walls, as a grappling hook.

To get ready to climb Everest, I did a lot of hill running with a daypack on and a lot of underwater swimming. I would swim a couple of lengths underwater and then a couple above. It gets your body going with limited oxygen.

I was always very active as a kid. I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.

The main thing as a director, you always want to have a bit of a worry about the material you're going to get yourself into. You want to be a bit scared of it so that you have that excitement of having to climb the mountain.

My pump-up songs before I compete are not the usual. They're more girly songs. I love 'The Climb' by Miley Cyrus. It's about the journey and savoring every moment. I have 'The World's Greatest' by R. Kelly on my playlist, too.

Whatever job you're asked to do, whether you think it's mundane, boring, or beneath you, do the best job you can. No assignment should be treated as a task. Before you can climb the ladder, you need to build a good foundation.

I did Star 80, which was a magnificent experience as well, but still, I was at the height of my career at the beginning. Then I had to jump down the ladder and climb back up again, which I didn't understand. That was very hard.

The younger me was motivated by a need to please others, by the pressure to climb the corporate ladder and make money, and by a fear of failure - all of which became more and more intense as I navigated the competitive landscape.

When I climb a fourteener, a 14,000-foot/4,260-meter peak, in the winter by myself, I leave an itinerary and information about where my vehicle will be parked and the name of the county sheriff to contact in case I don't get home.

God can be realized through all paths. All religions are true. The important thing is to reach the roof. You can reach it by stone stairs or by wooden stairs or by bamboo steps or by a rope. You can also climb up by a bamboo pole.

Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward?

I know that when I'm standing alone below a thousand-foot wall, looking up and considering a climb, my sponsors are the furthest thing from my mind. If I'm going to take risks, they are going to be for myself - not for any company.

Higher productivity enables companies to increase sales without adding workers. Even if job markets tighten and wages rise, corporate profits can continue to climb as long as worker productivity is growing faster than overall wages.

Our work for human dignity is often lonely, and almost always an uphill climb. At times, our efforts are misunderstood, and we are mistaken for the enemy. There has been a clear erosion of respect for U.N. blue and our impartiality.

I think that hope, that ability to envision, to imagine a better way, and then to apply yourself to it, is the way to climb out of a hole, is the way to build a better life, is the way to build a better community and a better country.

In 2004, I was on the West End stage in The Woman In White, and for every show I had to climb into a fat suit to play the obese Count Fosco. It was hard work, and unbearably hot, but I sailed through because I'd always kept myself fit.

I've climbed Stromboli when it's erupting, which is quite a heavy climb: three hours with a helmet to get to the top. When you're there, and it's dark, and you can see this eruption and feel it, it's quite different to watching it on TV.

I am very lucky that I came from a stable home, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life until acting sorted of landed in my lap when I was in my 20s. Acting, to me, was a bit like the ladder I used to climb out of feeling lost.

I drove down to Leh with my brother and from there, we had a two-day trek till the base camp of Stok Kangri. After a day's layover to acclimatize ourselves and a partial attempt to climb the peak, we attempted the final climb a day later.

Even a two-degree climb in average global temperatures could cause crop failures in parts of the world that can least afford to lose the nourishment. The size of deserts would increase, along with the frequency and intensity of wildfires.

To be clear, I normally climb with a rope and partner. Free-soloing makes up only a small percentage of my total climbing. But when I do solo, I manage the risk through careful preparation. I don't solo anything unless I'm sure I can do it.

For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Why climb? That's a question that baffles me. It perplexes me. I really asked that a lot on Everest. I can't justify it. I can't say it's for a good cause. All I can say is look at the history of exploration: it's full of vainglorious pursuits.

My father's father died when he was a teenager, and dad went to work to support his mother and two siblings as a carpenter and as a builder's mule, hauling carts of lumber to construction sites when it was too icy for the mules to climb the hills.

I want to write, I want to sing. I want to do the same thing for others, have my music, hopefully do that for others one day, not realizing what I sort of had to climb. I had an idea a little bit, but I think that I underestimated the whole thing.

I have had the good fortune to be able to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. I have enjoyed the freedom I had gained from building a successful business from scratch, making some money, and creating the lifestyle I wanted.

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.

I frequently find after a rehearsal of a performance that I have more breath, and can walk better and climb stairs better than I could before. It's as if I've expanded my lungs doing it. Basically speaking, conducting is quite a healthy profession.

If you're trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I've had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.

My first taste memory is pickle. Even as a kid, I was really weird. I liked chillis. I used to climb up the shelves in my grandmother's pantry. The pickle jar was kept right at the top. One time, I dropped the jar and it broke. I was totally busted.

I'm not the kind of person who's going to look at the top of a mountain and go, 'Oh, look at that! That's lovely. That's lovely, that top of that mountain.' I'm the kind of person who's going to go, 'Oh, my God! That's so lovely! Let's go climb up it!'

There were periods of my life when a lot of people didn't believe in me. I still had faith in myself. I really had to ask myself life questions. Where do I see myself in five years? Create a ladder for yourself, and walk up the steps. Climb that ladder.

I want adventure in my life. I want to do things I haven't done before. These Hollywood people are so careful of their image and looking right, but there's a wildness when I come into the photographs. I just want to wade through rivers, climb mountains.

'Dirtbag' is just the term we use, like a 'gnarly dude' in surfing. Within the climbing culture, it means being a committed lifer: someone who has embraced a minimalist ethic in order to rock climb. It basically means you're a homeless person by choice.

As a professional climber and photographer, I am asked to shoot in a lot of situations with a lot of different people. Sometimes I'm with the hardest, most seasoned alpinists in the world. Sometimes I'm hanging out with celebrities doing a benefit climb.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

I generally don't climb something if it makes me feel fear. The beauty of soloing is that there's no pressure - no one's telling me to do it. So if something seems scary, I don't have any obligation to do it. I can prepare further or just walk away entirely.

Specifically choose not to take a GPS. Just create a challenge. You can climb Everest or walk across Antarctica with minimal gear and still have that sense of adventure. But in terms of exploration, Google Earth has this world mapped down to the square foot.

Of course I climbed Everest without oxygen, but it's not the end of the story for me. The summit itself is not what counts. It's how'd you get there, what'd you climb, and there are really great opportunities to climb on this mountain. It's a beautiful place.

I have the tools to climb the mountain so I don't mind climbing mountains. I have climbed mountains since I was growing up in east London in Plaistow. I'm not scared of climbing mountains. When you get to the top, the view's great. That's what it's all about.

Poisonous frogs feast on insects that don't even have names. Tropical lizards disappear into the cracks of trees whose branches spread out as wide as their trunks climb high. This is the real Florida, as it was before people, and probably will be after us, too.

One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another's worlds, preventing gridlock.

It's hard to take people seriously who say you're totally irresponsible if you go out and climb mountains when you have kids, because they clearly don't understand the circumstances. You can't impose your own acceptance of risk on other people - that's not fair.

I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.

I used to choose friends based on similarity in age and life stage, but I've learned that those were the wrong criteria. Trying to live life exclusively alongside others our own age is like attempting to climb Mt. Everest without a Sherpa. It's a little dangerous.

The forms of thought, into which we throw our timid views of God, are but symbols of truths greater than our thoughts. Yet we may not set them aside as worthless, for they are the rungs on which we dwellers in the cave climb to the full view of the Truth, as he is.

Listen, running against Senator Graham is indeed a tough climb, but it is equally a hill worth climbing. I've faced things people have deemed impossible my entire life, and this is yet another journey where I prove that in America, the impossible is always possible.

To read Transtromer - the best times are at night, in silence, and alone - is to surrender to the far-fetched. It is to climb out of bed and listen to what the house is saying, and to how the wind outside responds. Each of his readers reads him as a personal secret.

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