Kevin O'Leary Quotes

I'm not a tough guy. I'm just delivering the truth and only the truth and if you can't deal with it, too bad.

What are the most important qualities that make a successful entrepreneur? The ability to communicate. The ability to express your idea with certainty. That's how you become a leader-even if you are unsure, your ability to explain your vision and your direction is the attribute you need the most. ... Articulate your idea in 90 seconds or less.

Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we're going to win.

You may lose your wife, you may lose your dog, your mother may hate you. None of those things matter. What matters is that you achieve success and become free. Then you can do whatever you like.

I actually think being an entrepreneur is a state of mind. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, my thesis is that you have to sacrifice everything for some period in your life to be successful. You have to be myopic and completely focused and unbalanced in every way. Once you've achieved success, you're free to do whatever you like.

My partners... taught me that in order to create wealth, I needed to pair up with people whose strengths compensated for my weaknesses.

Money is my military, each dollar a soldier. I never send my money into battle unprepared and undefended. I send it to conquer and take currency prisoner and bring it back to me.

I have had some great successes and great failures. I think every entrepreneur has. I try to learn from all of them.

Downturns are the best time to start businesses because you develop discipline that's very lean and mean in terms of how to spend money. And those habits serve you very well in good times.

The only reason to do business is to make money; that's the only reason for doing business.

We need physical exercise to prepare our brain for long periods of concentration

Life is hard, money doesn't care, your tears don’t add value

Vision is nothing without a plan to execute it.

If I were the president of the United States, I would make unions illegal. They no longer serve a functional purpose in democracy, in my view.

The road to riches is never straight and narrow. It can be riddled with financial land mines.

Being an employee is a bad outcome. You want to avoid that. Being an employee is never a good outcome. That's just an opinion.

So much of life is a negotiation - so even if you're not in business, you have opportunities to practice all around you.

Nobody forces you to work at Wal-Mart. Start your own business! Sell something to Wal-Mart!

The biggest mistake entrepreneurs can make is trying to do everything themselves. They usually blow up when they try. I did an inventory of every deal I've ever done and it turned out that every single deal I made money on was a partnership, and every colossal failure, where I lost millions, was something I tried to do by myself.

I have met many entrepreneurs who have the passion and even the work ethic to succeed - but who are so obsessed with an idea that they don't see its obvious flaws. Think about that. If you can't even acknowledge your failures, how can you cut the rope and move on?

I'd rather invest in an entrepreneur who has failed before than one who assumes success from day one.

I think a book is your calling card, your business card.

If you put Canada into $1.5 trillion in debt and interest rates go up just 200 basis points, you cannot provide the services to 36 million people that were guaranteed to them in the social contract they have with Canada. That's a very, very scary prospect. You can't burden this economy with that much debt. The risk you take on is insurmountable. You have to assume for the next 50 years that rates don't go up? That's insane. That's irresponsible. That's stupid.

Trump has been very, very open and clear on what he's going to do. He's going to make the U.S. very competitive on taxes, corporate and personal. He's eliminating policy on carbon and the regulatory environment on shale and energy and pipeline development. These are all things that Canada has to do and we no longer have a competitive environment to do them in. It manifests itself in the slow grind of our economy.

I'm not trying to make friends, I'm trying to make money.

Until Americans feel that their core asset - their homes - are stabilized, they are not going to have the animal spirits and they will continue to have less buying power.

You either make it illegal, in which case you support a huge underground economy or you tax it within the limits people can afford.

I never, ever, ever let emotion get in the way of an investment.

A lot of people have said a lot of great things about Steve Jobs. And for good reason: he built the world's second-most valuable company, with billions in profits and products that have improved every aspect of our lives. But Steve didn't get there by being a soft, fluffy, Kumbaya-type leader.

Do you want to be rich or not? Let's get focused on that, buddy

Don’t let the dark clouds of greed confuse you

People are aware of what I stand for through television. Nobody gets rich on TV but you build brand. That's what I'm attempting to do.

I like gold because it is a stabilizer; it is an insurance policy.

Don't cry about money, it never cries for you.

Imagine how foolish you'd look if, like one clever salesman who once pitched to me, you tried to license your product to a big industry player without knowing they just launched a competing product. With the right background research, he could have avoided that and other landmines - and so can you.

Here's how I think of my money - as soldiers - I send them out to war everyday. I want them to take prisoners and come home, so there's more of them.

Money equals freedom.

Filming 'The Road to Riches' was surprisingly difficult for me. I learned that going back to career successes and failures can be emotionally exhausting as you are forced to revisit the euphoric highs and painful lows in high speed.

When I turned 50, something clicked in my head and I said, 'I'm not going to live to 100. I'm half-cooked already.' I set the family down and I said, 'Listen everybody, we're now entering the decade of Daddy. We're going to start doing things that I want to do.

Know everything about the companies and people you are going to be negotiating with. Insist on getting the names of everyone participating in the negotiations. Leave no stone unturned; find out as much as you can.

Once in a while, I see my fellow TV investors praise a business just because they like the entrepreneur behind it. That kind of thinking might make you feel warm and fuzzy inside - but let's get back to reality.

Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas

If a man could give birth it would be to a book - it's an 18-month gestation period.

I could have easily gone down the wrong path and dropped out of school, but I was given a second chance.

I have great people working for me now. I surround myself with smart people.

There are a lot of impractical things about owning a Porsche. But they're all offset by the driving experience. It really is unique. Lamborghinis and Ferraris come close. And they are more powerful, but they don't handle like a Porsche.

All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible.

The practical reality of managing cars in the family - I do 36-month leases. I think they're horrible investments. And you want to give them back after their warranty is over.

I see negotiations as an honest attempt to reach a deal that's great for everyone at the table. But sometimes, for whatever reason, that's impossible. You need to accept that possibility-don't make a deal for the sake of making a deal. If you do, chances are it will fall apart later anyway, with costs and headaches for everyone involved. And once you walk away, don't come back.

I'm ashamed of what has happened to Canada. And I'm not leaving a $1.5 trillion deficit to my kids. No chance in hell is that happening.