Top 120 Anita Roddick Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Irritation is a great source of energy and creativity.”

— Anita Roddick

52. “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

53. “I think it is completely immoral for a shop to trade in the middle of a community, to take money and make profits from that community and then ignore the existence of that community, its needs and problems.”

— Anita Roddick

54. “My argument is: keep the bloody bottom line at the bottom. That’s where it should be.”

— Anita Roddick

55. “My mother’s bottom line was truth to her values. It meant bringing your heart and your humanity to work.”

— Anita Roddick

56. “We were most creative when our back was against the wall.”

— Anita Roddick

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

— Anita Roddick

58. “Creativity comes by breaking the rules, by saying that you’re in love with the anarchist.”

— Anita Roddick

59. “I think that business practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by “feminine” pinciples, qualities like love, care, and intuition.”

— Anita Roddick

60. “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.”

— Anita Roddick

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

— Anita Roddick

62. “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.”

— Anita Roddick

63. “Entrepreneurs are outsiders by nature – outsiders with a work ethic.”

— Anita Roddick

64. “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.”

— Anita Roddick

65. “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

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

— Anita Roddick

67. “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.”

— Anita Roddick

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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.”

— Anita Roddick

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

— Anita Roddick

72. “Whatever you do, be different – that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.”

— Anita Roddick

73. “Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking.”

— Anita Roddick

74. “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

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

— Anita Roddick

76. “When your back is against the wall financially, creative juices flow.”

— Anita Roddick

77. “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

78. “If you really didn’t ever want to get wrinkles, then you should have stopped smiling years ago!”

— Anita Roddick

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

— Anita Roddick

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?”

— Anita Roddick

85. “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

86. “I think it’s just fear of death. I can’t bear to go to sleep. There’s very little, you know, between an entrepreneur and a crazy person.”

— Anita Roddick

87. “Entrepreneurs are visionaries – they see things other people don’t see.”

— Anita Roddick

88. “There are only two ways of making money: the hard way and the very hard way!”

— Anita Roddick

89. “Let me tell you how the French seduce you. They are the most bloody seductive people on Earth. They are charming, they are well-mannered and they praise and flatter you.”

— Anita Roddick

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “The next time you go shopping, demand more change.”

— Anita Roddick

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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.”

— Anita Roddick

99. “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

100. “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