Anita Roddick Quotes

Whatever you do, be different. If you're different, you will stand out.

One of the most intriguing things in management and in business is the role of storytelling - people need the anecdotes to do the work that they do.

To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality.

I think the leadership of a company should encourage the next generation not just to follow, but to overtake.

Entrepreneurs are all a little crazy. There is a fine line between an entrepreneur and a crazy person. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. An entrepreneur's dream is often a kind of madness, and it is almost as isolating. What differentiates the entrepreneur from the crazy person is that the former gets other people to believe in his vision.

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 run my company according to feminine principles, principles of caring, making intuitive decisions, not getting hung up on hierarchy or all those dreadfully boring business-school management ideas; having a sense of work as being part of your life, not separate from it; putting your labor where your love is; being responsible to the world in how you use your profits; recognizing the bottom line should stay at the bottom.

If you really didn't ever want to get wrinkles, then you should have stopped smiling years ago!

You educate people, especially young people, by stirring their passions, so you take every opportunity to grab the imagination of your employees, you get them to feel they are doing something important, that they are not a lone voice, that they are the most powerful and potent people on the planet.

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

The key to handling problems and conflict within an organization is to keep the channels of communication wide open.

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.

I wake up every morning thinking...this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There's no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal.

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.

A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force. I love it.

The beauty and the fashion industry want to control you. And the way that they do it through your body. So once they control your body they control your purse and the products you buy. Its a fantastic strategy and it's working.

Look at the Quakers - they were excellent business people that never lied, never stole; they cared for their employees and the community which gave them the wealth. They never took more money out than they put back in.

The growth of The Body Shop is testimony to the fact that you don't need to waste money on costly advertising campaigns to be successful. Instead, we've always relied on word of mouth and stories.

Free trade holds much of the blame for continued international conflict. Markets are said to possess wisdom that is somehow superior to man. Those of us in business who travel in the developing world see the results of such western wisdom and have a rumbling disquiet about much of what our economic institutions have bought into.

I want to define success by redefining it. For me it isn't that solely mythical definition - glamour, allure, power of wealth, and the privilege from care. Any definition of success should be personal because it's so transitory. It's about shaping my own destiny.

The movement for the environment really only started in the mid 1970's.

I didn't go to business school, didn't care about financial stuff and the stock market.

There are no rules or formulas for success. You just have to live it and do it. knowing this gives us enormous freedom to experiment toward what we want. Believe me, it's a crazy, complicated journey. It's trial and error. It's opportunism. It's quite literally, "Let's try lots of this stuff and see how it works."

A great advantage I had when I started The Body Shop was that I had never been to business school.

Tap the energy of the anarchist and he will be the one to push your company ahead.

Make heroes out of the employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.

With fewer and fewer corporations controlling more and more of the world's trade, there is an ever greater need to know more about the practices of these large faceless organizations.

Entrepreneurs are visionaries - they see things other people don't see.

Mess with nature and it will mess right back.

The money that we make from the company goes into The Body Shop Foundation, which isn't one of those awful tax shelters like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.

the function of wealth is not to accumulate it but to give it away as productively and responsibly as you can.

Entrepreneurs are outsiders by nature - outsiders with a work ethic.

The market controls everything, but the market has no heart.

To me the desire to create and to have control over your own life, irrespective of the politics of the time or social structures, has always been a part of the human spirit. What I did not fully realize was that work could open the doors to my heart.

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 30 years on The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here!

Maybe this is what the future will look like: fresh, clean water will be so rare it will be guarded by armies. Water as the next oil - the next resource worth going to war over.

Globalization ... is the most important change in the history of mankind, and often just the latest name for the conspiracy of the rich against the poor.

My goal was livelihood. We don't use that word often enough. If I could give one piece of advice to anyone it's don't obsess with this notion that you have to turn everything you do into a business, because that ends up being a small version of a large company. But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

If you pretend that business is beyond morality, that's the kind of morality you get.

We are honest about our methods and our mistakes. We are not perfect - it isn't possible to be perfect - but we are trying to go in the right direction and in those circumstances, it's best not to mystify what we are trying to do.

My mother's bottom line was truth to her values. It meant bringing your heart and your humanity to work.

The big question is: how do you institutionalize success and still keep that edge of craziness and wildeness?

Business is not financial science, it's about trading.. buying and selling. It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it.

Creativity comes by breaking the rules, by saying that you're in love with the anarchist.

If there is excitement in their lives, it is contained in the figures on the profit and loss sheet. What an indictment.

But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

Speed, agility and responsiveness are the keys to future success.