Success Quote by Anita Roddick

A neat trick of this line is how it flatters capitalism with one hand and indicts it with the other. "The market controls everything" isn’t a slogan of liberation; it’s a blunt admission of power. Roddick frames the market less as a neutral mechanism than as a governing force - something closer to weather or empire than to "choice". Then she turns the knife: "but the market has no heart". The pivot is small, almost casual, and that’s what makes it sting. If the market is sovereign, and sovereignty is amoral, who’s left to do the caring?

Roddick’s context matters. As the founder of The Body Shop, she built a brand around ethical consumption before it was a corporate checkbox. She’s not speaking as an anti-business purist; she’s speaking as someone who knows how incentives work because she’s worked them. That credibility lets her smuggle a moral argument into a business-friendly frame: markets can allocate resources efficiently, but they can’t generate obligations. They reward what sells, not what’s right.

The subtext is a warning against outsourcing conscience. When companies hide behind "market demand", they’re really dodging responsibility: exploitation becomes "competitiveness", environmental harm becomes "externalities", poverty becomes "pricing". Roddick’s line is an argument for inserting a human veto into the system - through regulation, culture, consumer pressure, or corporate governance - because the default setting of the market isn’t cruelty or kindness. It’s indifference, polished into inevitability.