Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea and the resources to make it happen.

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.

What we are trying to do is to create a new business paradigm, simply showing that business can have a human face and a social conscience.

Every time you buy something consider it a vote of confidence in the company that produced it.

If civilization is going to survive, business and policy-makers must move on, to find within themselves more developed emotions than fear or greed.

I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs