“Beverages have to be created. And they’re created by looking at what trend is in, say, the fashion industry – what color’s hot right now.”

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.

But when you really believe-in yourself, in your dream-you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality. No great achievement happens by luck.

My parents really wanted me to get out of New York, be exposed to other people, other ways of life.

Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.

We have no patent on anything we do and anything we do can be copied by anyone else. But you can’t copy the heart and the soul and the conscience of the company.

In life, you can blame a lot of people and you can wallow in self-pity or you can pick yourself up and say listen, I have to be responsible for myself.

The hardest thing about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability. And that has a lot to do with trust.

When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.

This may sound a bit naive, but I got here by believing in big dreams.

Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.