Anita Roddick Quotes

Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.

I don't want to be defined by being the founder of the Body Shop, and I don't want to be defined as a woman suffering from Hepatitis C. There's more to my life than that.

It's frustrating sometimes to see the mismatch in resources between the pointless and the urgent, isn't it. Like the gap between the vast resources poured into military technological research to make war more sophisticated, and the trickle that goes into developing techniques that might prevent war instead.

Women are networkers, women hate hierarchy and especially entrepreneurs hate hierarchy because when they see hierarchy structured in they see rules and regulations are commonplace, and they want to tear it down.

My argument is: keep the bloody bottom line at the bottom. That's where it should be.

By creating conversation, we let our customers spread our message by word of mouth.

I think it is completely immoral for a shop to trade in the middle of a community, to take money and make profits from that community and then ignore the existence of that community, its needs and problems.

We entrepreneurs are loners, vagabonds, troublemakers. Success is simply a matter of finding and surrounding ourselves with those open-minded and clever souls who can take our insanity and put it to good use.

The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.

How can you ennoble the spirit when you are selling something as inconsequential as a face cream?

The end result of kindness is that it draws people to you.

At The Body Shop we had always been measured by how many jobs we had created, and I got a major award from the Queen on that.

When your back is against the wall financially, creative juices flow.

the leaders of globalization ... have tied themselves to a single measurement by which they judge success and failure ... They only measure money and the bottom line.

We are essentially outsiders and that is the best definition of an entrepreneur I have ever come across.

If I had to name a driving force in my life, I would name PASSION every time

It is true that there is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.

The predominant idea behind globalization, in its most virulent form, is an unpleasant kind of social Darwinism - that the world is for winners not losers, that only the successful count, that money is considerably more important than votes.

There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it.

We should be evolving into a new age of business with a worldview that maintains one simple proposition - that all of nature: humans, animals, earth, are interconnected and interdependent.

Whatever you do, be different - that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can't think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you're different, you will stand out.

By definition, design, and practice, capitalism is a system that concentrates economic power in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the many.

Don't underestimate the power of the vigilante consumer.

the most powerful bodies in the world, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, are also the least democratic and inclusive.

The aging process is fascinating because it doesn't disturb me, because this is what it is supposed to be like. But I'll tell you what does - it's the lack of strength - you can't hold up suitcases and do it yourself. Loss of physical strength.

I don't think I'm a risk-taker. I don't think any entrepreneur is. I think that's one of those myths of commerce. The new entrepreneur is more values-led: you do what looks risky to other people because that's what your convictions tell you to do. Other companies would say I'm taking risks, but that's my path - it doesn't feel like risk to me.

Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.

When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry sickness - you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is such fun

Successful entrepreneurs may hate hierarchies and structures and try to destroy them. They may garner the disapproval of MBAs for their creativity and wildness. But they have antennae in their heads. When they walk down the street anywhere in the world, they have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem, or even something in a completely different business.

The bigger you grow, the more intimate communication has to be. It almost has to be belly and belly. As you get bigger and bigger in an organization, everything gets more and more detached and everything is on email or voicemail. That's the worse thing because lack of intimacy is one of the downsides (of growth).

People don't want simply to buy the product, they want to have sympathy with the company too.

I think progress is a sort of comfortable disease, and we've got a media that says entertainment and celebrity, which isn't bad in itself but it stops the real issues coming forward.

You've got so many groups that have no voice in this world - the indigenous, the poor. So how can I use the resources that I have and bring them up, highlight them. And it's not that difficult. It's just choosing and concentrating and focusing.

If you don't believe one person can make a difference, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.

if companies are in business solely to make money, no consumer can fully trust what they do or say.

we can wake up one morning and find that the technology of this virtual, inter-connected world wasn't the liberating force we thought, but binds us ever more tightly under the control of the money men.

I don't want our success to be measured only by financial yardsticks, or by our distribution or number of shops. What I want to be celebrated for - and it's going to be tough in a business environment - is how good we are to our employees and how we benefit our community. It's a different bottom line.

We have our values from the church, the temple, the mosque. Do not rob, do not murder. But our behaviour changes the minute we go into the corporate place. Suddenly all of this is irrelevant.

Communication is the key for any global business.

Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice.

To run this business ... you need ... optimism, humanism, enthusiasm, intuition, curiosity, love, humour, magic and fun, and that secret ingredient-euph oria.

I think it's just fear of death. I can't bear to go to sleep. There's very little, you know, between an entrepreneur and a crazy person.

Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.

Women are storytellers, they are communicators. They'll go and sit around a table and talk about their first date, their first smoke, their first lipstick, whatever it is. Those rituals of life, marriages and death aren't part of the language of men.

If you've got a partner that's supportive and you're doing something you enjoy it doesn't ever become a job or a burden. Its about community, new friendships, support mechanism.

The trouble with the new world we have watched being created over the past decade is that it sees no further than money. People have always been obsessed with money, of course - greed is as old as history. But when the institutions that govern all our lives forget there was ever anything else, then it gets dangerous.

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message.