Anita Roddick Quotes
120 Anita Roddick Quotes
1 2 3
Making intuitive decisions, not getting hung up on hierarchy or all those dreadfully boring business school management ideas.
Anita Roddick
[On an ad showing the naked buttocks of three men] We thought it was funny and witty here, but women in New Hampshire fainted.
Anita Roddick
On the whole businesses do not listen to the consumer. Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice.
Anita Roddick
My mum told me ‘You are different! You are different! You can do whatever you want.’ She pushed me to bravery in everything I did. She rejected every sacred cow.
Anita Roddick
[On Gordon Roddick writing political messages attacking the local council on top of their blackboard with the daily menu] This was a foretaste of our belief that business should have a social conscience.
Anita Roddick
Businesses which forego profits to build communities, or keep production local… risk losing business to cheaper competitors without such commitments, and being targeted for take-over by… corporate raiders.
Anita Roddick
I pay my staff to be active citizens.
Anita Roddick
How do you measure time? How do you measure standing outside Shell for four hours and picketing with 50 or 60 of your employees? Gordon has been in Brazil for the past four weeks [working with one of the Body Shop community trade suppliers]. How do you measure the time lost to the company? It’s like breathing; it is so integrated.
Anita Roddick
You couldn’t do anything better for your business than align it with a charity dear to your heart. Not only will this be good for employee morale, help society, and reduce the government’s burden, but being associated with charity attracts tremendous media attention and can help establish your business’s name in your community.
Anita Roddick
If we don’t love our staff, our neighbours, the environment, we’ll all be doomed.
Anita Roddick
The constant tension for me, is to keep a small company style in a bloody big company.
Anita Roddick
I want to find escape routes to areas where intimacy can be encouraged. I constantly try to challenge the staff; I bring out a magazine from my office that comes straight from my heart. This is a desperate attempt to keep intimacy; getting them to come back to talk to me.
Anita Roddick
I sometimes wonder why we’re not more outraged by the fact that three billion people live on less than $2 a day, while the wealthy have stashed away $8 trillion dollars in tax havens. They certainly don’t seem to be picking up the tab on world poverty.
Anita Roddick
Despite the astonishing wealth of the so-called ‘long-boom’, a fifth of the human race is still living in absolute poverty without access to proper food or clean water.
Anita Roddick
The greatest sickness in our society is loneliness and if anyone of us have a product or a store that counteracts loneliness then we will have a business that will last forever.
Anita Roddick
Retailing is one of the oldest professions. There has never been a historic respect for it. Yet it can be one of the most exciting because it is often dealing right at the community level.
Anita Roddick
[On taking care of employees] I always measure a company’s lavatory and its canteen and if they are good you know they are being looked after.
Anita Roddick
90% of retailing is with women. If all the retailers could get together on this…!
Anita Roddick
Which retailer has the best practice in terms of education, human resources, and communications? Get together as retailers. Form an alliance and exchange information.
Anita Roddick
We need, each and everyone of us, to know that we can make a difference. We need business that respects and supports communities and families. We need business that safeguards the environment. We need business that encourages countries to educate their children, heal their sick, value the work of women and respect human rights.
Anita Roddick
For us, socially responsible business is also about reaching out to other organizations and corporations…
Anita Roddick
In order to put together our social audit, more than 5,000 individuals and organizations with a stake in The Body Shop were consulted on the issues of importance to them. And we found that quite often they told us exactly what we didn’t want to hear.
Anita Roddick
It was never, never something that was just clothes to wear. If I’m not going to do this in life, why am I going to do it for my business? To me, you’ve got to live every part of it.
Anita Roddick
It is a radical idea to consider anything other than financial profits. But remember, corporations are invented. They are human institutions, not species found in nature.
Anita Roddick
We, as business leaders, can and must change our views and our values. Less than a century ago… depressions and world wars changed us; global poverty and environmental destruction must change us now.
Anita Roddick
What I am trying to do in my company at the moment is to push it away from being personalized by me as the visionary leader. I have to go through another decade of really planned thinking of how the leadership can be in the company…
Anita Roddick
[On staying at employees houses rather than at hotels] I want to share information. I want to take the remarkable people I work with and bring them to my home, spend time with them, eat with them, greet them, walk at night with them, and have these wonderful, almost family-like gatherings with them.
Anita Roddick
We don’t have a system for celebrating. Any man or woman who sticks his or her head out like a giraffe isn’t seen as a leader in the community. They’re seen as an irritant, a revolutionary, maybe anarchic. Anyone who challenges the status quo or the sacred cows of business or education or all those institutions which are so moribund… is diminished and made silly or menial.
Anita Roddick
Media, I think, are one of the greatest protagonists of diminishing the role of heroes and leadership in our society…
Anita Roddick
It seems to me when you become outspoken, when you are altruistic in an environment that doesn’t celebrate… humanity in any way, in which business has not played a compassionate role, the media do not know what to make of you as a leader.
Anita Roddick
This notion that to be in business you've got to go to a business school: it's crap.
Anita Roddick
Business schools only shape you to be a very efficient person working in a very traditional system - but the most exciting things are what's being done untraditionally.
Anita Roddick
Television loves photogenic people - and it also loves and feeds on conflict.
Anita Roddick
Women are storytellers, they are communicators. They'll go and sit around a table and talk about their first date… their first lipstick, whatever it is. Those rituals of life, marriages and death aren't part of the language of men.
Anita Roddick
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. And when that goes, all creativity goes.
Anita Roddick
I found really early on that the people who didn't support me where the financial journalists, because we weren't in the mould - the language wasn't the sort of language they were using.
Anita Roddick
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
I wake up every morning thinking… this is my last day. And I jam everything into it.
Anita Roddick
With courage, passion, and imagination, everything is possible!
Anita Roddick
You’ve got to do it! There’s no ‘How will you? How can you?’ You just do it!
Anita Roddick
1 2 3
Return from Anita Roddick Quotes to
Quoteswise.com