Anita Roddick Quotes

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.

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."

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.

I'd have opened a bloody library if I'd wanted to be quiet.

Internationalism means that we can see into the dark corners of the world, and hold those companies to account when they are devastating forests or employing children as bonded labour. Globalization is the complete opposite, its rules pit country against country and workers against workers in the blinkered pursuit of international competitiveness.

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

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.

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

If you can shape your business life or your working life, you can just look at it as another extension - you just fulfill all your values as a human being in the work place. If you are an activist, you bring the activism of your life into your business, or if you love creative art, you can bring that in.

But the minute we went public on the stock market, which is how our wealth was created, it was no longer how many people you employed, it was how much you were worth and how much your company was worth.

I believe in businesses where you engage in creative thinking, and where you form some of your deepest relationships. If it isn't about the production of the human spirit, we are in big trouble.

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

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

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

Economic globalization creates wealth, but only for the elite who benefit from the surge of consolidations, mergers, global scale technology, and financial activity.

The freedom that comes with globalization is freedom for the rich and powerful nations to further exploit and further marginalize those at the bottom of the social ladder.

When you take the high moral road it is difficult for anyone to object without sounding like a complete fool.

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

Communication is the key for any global business.

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.

First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.

If I had to choose my driving force, it would be passion.

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

I have always found that my view of success has been iconoclastic: success to me is not about money or status or fame, its about finding a livelihood that brings me joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.

I think the leadership of a company should encourage the next generation not just to follow, but to overtake. The duty of leadership is to put forward ideas, symbols, metaphors of the way it should be done, so that the next generation can work out new and better ways of doing the job. The complaint Gordon and I have is that we are not being overtaken by our staff. We would like to be able to say, "We can't keep up with you guys", but, it is not happening.

If I can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?

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.

If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been to bed with a mosquito.

The next time you go shopping, demand more change.

Over the past decade ... while many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual,' I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda.

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.

My passionate belief is that business can be fun, it can be conducted with love and a powerful force for good.

A social conscience is not incompatible with profit.

People I work with are open to leadership that has a vision, but this vision has to be communicated clearly and persuasively, and always, always with passion.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking.

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.

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

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.

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

Being good is good business

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

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

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.

Traditionally, the role of the individual was to conform to the organization. In the future the organization will have to conform to the needs of the individual.

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

The word love is never mentioned in big business.

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

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

Years ago nobody was elected on the economic ticket. It was either the education platform, or it was health or it was other issues. It is only recently that economic values have superceded every other human value.

Not all revolutionaries set out to change the world per se; some set out to change their own worlds. And in so doing, they often change the way one person, or a few people, or whole communities, or entire nations or the world thinks and operates in some significant way.

I have no interest in being the biggest, the most profitable or the largest retailer. I just want The Body Shop to be the best, most breathlessly exciting company - and one that changes the way business is carried out.

I believe that conventional marketing techniques are increasingly ineffective. Customers are hyped out. They have been overmarketed. They are becoming more cynical about the whole advertising and marketing process.

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.

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.

There are a lot of dark sides to success, but the light side of it is the ability to be opportunistic, and to be able to do things.

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.

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.

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.

You persuade people with passion, so you've got to have a product or service you feel emotionally charged about. Then you can tell stories about it that will inspire others.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Never be seduced into believing it isn't the role of business to tackle the big issues, because it absolutely is.

Ninety-nine per cent of what we say is about values. I firmly believe that ethical capitalism is the best way of changing society for the better.

Never feel too small or powerless to make a difference.

I am aware that success is more than a good idea. It is timing too.

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.

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

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.

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.

Corporate crime kills far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime.

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

You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message. What I have learned is that people become motivated when you guide them to the source of their own power and when you make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.

Irritation is a great source of energy and creativity.

If trade undermines life, narrows it or impoverishes it, then it can destroy the world. If it enhances life, then it can better the world.

Be special. Be anything but mediocre.

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.

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

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

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

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

I traveled enormously during the 1960's, when you measured everything by where you traveled and what you did as travelers.

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.

I'm an activist and I come from a very socialist background. For me, my thinking was formed by great thought leaders. And wealth preserving wasn't part of my thinking.

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.

For me, campaigning and good business is also about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practices or human rights abuses.

Any business or enterprise that shaves away loneliness is going to last forever. And like it or not but we've got a lonely society.

Business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments. And what is it doing with this power? It is using free trade, the most powerful weapon at its disposal, to tighten its grip on the globe.

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.

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.

Mess with nature and it will mess right back ...