Top 100 Anita Roddick Quotes
#1. A great advantage I had when I started The Body Shop was that I had never been to business school.
Anita Roddick
#2. 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.
Anita Roddick
#3. I traveled enormously during the 1960's, when you measured everything by where you traveled and what you did as travelers.
Anita Roddick
#4. 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.
Anita Roddick
#5. If companies are in business solely to make money, no consumer can fully trust what they do or say.
Anita Roddick
#6. If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.
Anita Roddick
#7. 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.
Anita Roddick
#8. If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been to bed with a mosquito.
Anita Roddick
#9. My passionate belief is that business can be fun, it can be conducted with love and a powerful force for good.
Anita Roddick
#10. Advertising beauty products is easy. All you have to do is revile your customers by creating a disease called getting older, and then provide a remedy which does not work.
Anita Roddick
#11. 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.
Anita Roddick
#12. How can you ennoble the spirit when you are selling something as inconsequential as a face cream?
Anita Roddick
#13. 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.
Anita Roddick
#14. You've got to be hungry - for ideas, to make things happen and to see your vision made into reality
Anita Roddick
#15. If I had to name a driving force in my life, I would name PASSION every time
Anita Roddick
#16. Every time you buy something consider it a vote of confidence in the company that produced it.
Anita Roddick
#17. I didn't go to business school, didn't care about financial stuff and the stock market.
Anita Roddick
#18. 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.
Anita Roddick
#19. 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.
Anita Roddick
#21. Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking.
Anita Roddick
#22. If civilization is going to survive, business and policy-makers must move on, to find within themselves more developed emotions than fear or greed.
Anita Roddick
#23. 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.
Anita Roddick
#24. When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry sickness - you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is such fun.
Anita Roddick
#25. 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.
Anita Roddick
#26. If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
Anita Roddick
#27. When your back is against the wall financially, creative juices flow.
Anita Roddick
#28. You can't change t he wor ld f rom t he rear view mir ror.
Anita Roddick
#29. There are only two ways of making money: the hard way and the very hard way!
Anita Roddick
#30. If I had to choose my driving force, it would be passion.
Anita Roddick
#32. Retiring isn't even a word I'd understand. Taking what makes you feel alive, and everyone's looking for ways of making them feel alive, in whatever they do - relationships, business or work - and not just being a voice for a money making business.
Anita Roddick
#33. We are essentially outsiders and that is the best definition of an entrepreneur I have ever come across.
Anita Roddick
#34. 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.
Anita Roddick
#35. 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.
Anita Roddick
#36. 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.
Anita Roddick
#37. The end result of kindness is that it draws people to you.
Anita Roddick
#38. If you pretend that business is beyond morality, that's the kind of morality you get.
Anita Roddick
#39. There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it.
Anita Roddick
#40. Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear-view mirror.
Anita Roddick
#41. The next time you go shopping, demand more change.
Anita Roddick
#42. Mess with nature and it will mess right back ...
Anita Roddick
#43. 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.
Anita Roddick
#44. 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.
Anita Roddick
#45. Values carry the message of shared purposes, standards and conceptions of what is worth living for and what is worth striving for.
Anita Roddick
#46. The function of wealth is not to accumulate it but to give it away as productively and responsibly as you can.
Anita Roddick
#47. All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good.
Anita Roddick
#48. 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.
Anita Roddick
#49. A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force. I love it.
Anita Roddick
#50. If I can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?
Anita Roddick
#51. 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.
Anita Roddick
#52. 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.
Anita Roddick
#53. I am aware that success is more than a good idea. It is timing too.
Anita Roddick
#54. 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.
Anita Roddick
#55. If you really didn't ever want to get wrinkles, then you should have stopped smiling years ago!
Anita Roddick
#56. 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.
Anita Roddick
#57. 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.
Anita Roddick
#58. 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.
Anita Roddick
#59. 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.
Anita Roddick
#60. I think that business practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by "feminine" pinciples, qualities like love, care, and intuition.
Anita Roddick
#61. 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.
Anita Roddick
#62. We can't have self-government without the self-confidence that is at the root of it.
Anita Roddick
#63. 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.
Anita Roddick
#64. If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.
Anita Roddick
#65. 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.
Anita Roddick
#66. 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.
Anita Roddick
#67. I can't bear to be around people who are bland or bored or uninterested (or to employ them).
Anita Roddick
#68. I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs
Anita Roddick
#69. 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.
Anita Roddick
#70. For me, campaigning and good business is also about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practices or human rights abuses.
Anita Roddick
#71. A social conscience is not incompatible with profit.
Anita Roddick
#72. If there is excitement in their lives, it is contained in the figures on the profit and loss sheet. What an indictment.
Anita Roddick
#73. The big question is: how do you institutionalize success and still keep that edge of craziness and wildeness?
Anita Roddick
#74. My argument is: keep the bloody bottom line at the bottom. That's where it should be.
Anita Roddick
#75. A Sense Of Outrage Is Essential For The Entrepreneurial Spirit. I Think Discontentment Drives You To Want To Do Something About It. And My Outrage Came Very Early On.
Anita Roddick
#76. 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.
Anita Roddick
#77. Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea and the resources to make it happen.
Anita Roddick
#78. When you take the high moral road it is difficult for anyone to object without sounding like a complete fool.
Anita Roddick
#79. The word love is never mentioned in big business.
Anita Roddick
#80. Speed, agility and responsiveness are the keys to future success.
Anita Roddick
#81. 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.
Anita Roddick
#82. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
Anita Roddick
#83. It is a critical job of any entrepreneur to maximize creativity, and to build the kind of atmosphere around you that encourages people to have ideas. That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged.
Anita Roddick
#84. The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed
Anita Roddick
#85. The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.
Anita Roddick
#86. 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.
Anita Roddick
#87. To run this business ... you need ... optimism, humanism, enthusiasm, intuition, curiosity, love, humour, magic and fun, and that secret ingredient-euph oria.
Anita Roddick
#88. Why should how I act in my workplace be any different from how I interact with my family at home? It's making sure the company runs on feminine principles where the major ethic is care.
Anita Roddick
#89. 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.
Anita Roddick
#90. We communicate with passion and passion persuades.
Anita Roddick
#91. 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.
Anita Roddick
#92. Never be seduced into believing it isn't the role of business to tackle the big issues, because it absolutely is.
Anita Roddick
#93. Tap the energy of the anarchist and he will be the one to push your company ahead.
Anita Roddick
#94. By creating conversation, we let our customers spread our message by word of mouth.
Anita Roddick
#95. Creativity comes by breaking the rules, by saying that you're in love with the anarchist.
Anita Roddick
#96. My mother's bottom line was truth to her values. It meant bringing your heart and your humanity to work.
Anita Roddick
#97. A vision is something you see and others don't. Some people would say that's a pocket definition of lunacy. But it also defines entrepreneurial spirit.
Anita Roddick
#98. Irritation is a great source of energy and creativity.
Anita Roddick
#99. 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.
Anita Roddick
#100. 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.
Anita Roddick
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