Time & Perspective Quote by Anita Roddick

Roddick is smuggling a provocation into a sentence that sounds, at first blush, like a history lesson. By insisting that “all through history” there have “always been movements” where commerce served “the public good,” she’s not merely praising ethical enterprise; she’s rejecting the modern alibi that profit is business’s only natural language. The line works because it treats shareholder-first ideology as the weird historical outlier, not the default setting. That reversal is the point.

The subtext is defensive and insurgent at once. Roddick, as the face of The Body Shop and a high-profile advocate for fair trade and anti-animal-testing campaigns, spent years being told that activism was a marketing garnish or a distraction. Her phrasing anticipates the eye-roll: you want “public good”? Fine. Don’t call it naive; call it traditional. “Movements” is doing heavy lifting here, shifting attention away from heroic individual CEOs and toward collective pressure: cooperatives, mutual aid societies, labor organizing, social enterprise before it had a TED-friendly name.

There’s also a shrewd, slightly uncomfortable ambiguity. “Not just” concedes that proceeds still matter; she’s not preaching asceticism. She’s arguing for a wider ledger: reputation, responsibility, community impact, the cost of externalities. In the late 20th-century era of deregulation and brand globalization, that’s a cultural challenge as much as a business one. Roddick isn’t asking permission for values; she’s claiming precedent, and using it as leverage against an economy that pretends it has none.