Success Quote by Anita Roddick

Roddick’s line is a polite grenade lobbed into the boardroom: a refusal of the idea that business is only a machine for turning capital into more capital. The repetition of “I want” isn’t just personal preference; it’s a demand that work carry moral weight. She builds a ladder of meaning - “contributes,” “part of,” “not just,” “believe in” - moving from civic participation to outright faith. That escalation matters. “Invest” is the cool, rational verb of finance; “believe” is emotional, almost religious. She’s deliberately dragging the language of purpose into a space that prefers spreadsheets.

The subtext is also tactical. Roddick isn’t rejecting profit; she’s reframing it as insufficient on its own. By insisting a company be “part of the community,” she implies the opposite model: corporations as extractive outsiders, accountable to shareholders but not neighbors. Her phrasing makes that critique without sounding like a manifesto, which is part of why it works. It’s aspirational enough to recruit people and accusatory enough to pressure institutions.

Context sharpens the edge. As the founder of The Body Shop, Roddick helped popularize the idea that ethics could be a brand asset: cruelty-free products, fair trade sourcing, activism as storefront decor and corporate policy. In the late 20th-century boom years, when consumerism often posed as personal liberation, she flips the script. Belief isn’t something you buy after you’re rich; it’s the point of building the company in the first place.