“I never wanted to be on any billionaires list. I never define myself by net worth. I always try to define myself by my values.”

While we are a coffee company at heart, Starbucks provides much more than the best cup of coffee—we offer a community gathering place where people come together to connect and discover new things.

Business leaders cannot be bystanders.

Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can’t cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.

Starbucks trying to build a different kind of company around the balance of profitably and benevolence. A social conscience. And that isn’t a program it has to be a way of life.

Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.

Great companies are defined by their discipline and their understanding of who they are and who they are not.

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.

Success is empty if you arrive at the finish line alone.

In this ever-changing society, the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart.

To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader.

We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.

Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy.

A great business has to have a conscience. You have to know who you are and who you are not.

At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.

People want guidance, not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is, and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and authority to act on it.

Sometimes you have to create the thing you want to be part of.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

You can’t really make people be any different than what they are.

You have to be true to who you are.

A person who is knowingly bent on bad behavior, gets upset when better behavior is expected of them.

In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.

The thing is, even if you’re playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.

We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.

Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character.