Anita Roddick (1942-2007) was the public face of the Body Shop cosmetics–store chain she founded. Roddick, one of Britain’s most successful and visible business executives, was also a strident environmental and animal–rights activist. Roddick “believed that businesses could be run ethically, with what she called ‘moral leadership,’ and still turn a profit,” Sarah Lyall wrote in the New York Times. In 2006, one year before she died, Roddick sold the Body Shop and its 2,100 stores to cosmetics giant L’Oréal for ––C625 million ($1.3 billion).

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If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.

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

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

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

I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.

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

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

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

The money that we make from the company goes into The Body Shop Foundation, which isn’t one of those awful tax shelters like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.

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

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.

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.

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.

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