Anita Roddick Quotes

120 Anita Roddick Quotes

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I would love it if every shareholder of every company wrote a letter every time they received a company’s annual report and accounts. I would like them to say something like ‘Okay that’s fine, very good. But where are the details of your environmental audit? Where are your details of accounting to the community? Where is your social audit?
Anita Roddick

The Body Shop is against animal testing of cosmetics and toiletries, products, and ingredients. We have never tested or commissioned others to test our products or their ingredients on animals.
Anita Roddick

When I opened the first branch of The Body Shop twenty years ago, I was against animal testing. It seemed to me then and it still seems to me cruel and totally unacceptable to sacrifice animals for human vanity.
Anita Roddick

For The Body Shop it’s always a question of, can we do better?
Anita Roddick

[On testing cosmetics on animals] Can we put more pressure on suppliers to stop testing? Can we find a new way to press the politicians to ban the tests?
Anita Roddick

We won’t buy any ingredient that a supplier has tested on animals after December 31, 1990, for another cosmetics company. We employ a staff simply to ensure our suppliers comply.
Anita Roddick

‘Against Animal Testing’ is in the soul of The Body Shop. It sets us apart from others in the industry.
Anita Roddick

We do not believe skin and hair care products are the body and blood of Jesus Christ. We absolutely believe that human and animal rights and respect for the environment are.
Anita Roddick

The Body Shop is not a vegan company. We do use honey, milk and lanolin…
Anita Roddick

The Body Shop makes great skin and hair care products. But our mission is to achieve social and environmental change.
Anita Roddick



We believe that business is absolutely part of life.
Anita Roddick

Lead by example but don’t preach.
Anita Roddick

Be brave.
Anita Roddick

Have big ideas and make them happen.
Anita Roddick

Look up and out, not down and in. Never give up!
Anita Roddick

The animal movement needs to be clear about what we want to achieve and make achieving it accessible to people. Be positive. Offer alternatives to consumers and to companies.
Anita Roddick

I want to make things happen, to spread human values wide in business if I possibly can.
Anita Roddick

Having L’Oreal come in and say we like you, we like your ethics, we want to be a part of you, we want you to teach us things, it’s a gift. I’m ecstatic about it. I don’t see it as selling out.
Anita Roddick

[On working with L’Oreal] They could work with our Nicaraguan farmers who sell us 70 tons of sesame oil. How many tons could they use? A thousand? I mean it’s mind-blowing in terms of poverty eradication.
Anita Roddick

I am mystified by the fact that the business world is apparently proud to be seen as hard and uncaring and detached from human values…
Anita Roddick



I think all business practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by ‘feminine’ principles – qualities like love and care and intuition.
Anita Roddick

If your aspirations come from the values of your culture… you have something beyond your livelihood creation. You’re coming to work not as a nine-to-five sort of death but a nine-to-five sort of living.
Anita Roddick

No entrepreneur is motivated by money. It is the idea; seeing how far you can go.
Anita Roddick

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

[On taking The Body Shop into the United States without ‘major launch advertising’ and one Harvard Business School professor saying she would fail] I’ll never hire anybody from Harvard Business School. People are international. Ideas have wings. If we can manage in Chinese-speaking countries and in the Middle-East, why do they think America’s going to be such a problem?
Anita Roddick

For me, the joy of selling bubblebath is to take that profit and do something with it.
Anita Roddick

Stories are the soul of The Body Shop. Customers come into The Body Shop to buy hair conditioner and find a story about the Xingu reserve and the Kayapo Indians who collect Brazil nuts for us…
Anita Roddick

We pay them more for it, and that gives them an alternative to their logging income, which in turn protects the rain forest.
Anita Roddick

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.
Anita Roddick

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



I tried to redefine work as a spiritual endeavour, not just a job, not just a Monday to Friday sort of death.
Anita Roddick

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

Successful entrepreneurs may hate hierarchies and structures and try to destroy them. They may garner the disapproval of MBA’s 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, even something in a completely different business.
Anita Roddick

Measure your success according to fun and creativity.
Anita Roddick

If you can shape your business life or your working life, you can just look at it as another extension – you just fulfil 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.
Anita Roddick

There is no scientific answer for success. You can’t define it. You’ve simply go to live it and do it.
Anita Roddick

Potential entrepreneurs are outsiders. They are people who imagine things as they might be, not as they are, and have the drive to change the world around them. Those are skills that business schools do not teach.
Anita Roddick

There’s no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal.
Anita Roddick

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.
Anita Roddick

[On contracting Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion] It’s a bit of a bummer, but you groan and move on.
Anita Roddick



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