Kevin O'Leary

“My worst fashion faux pas: probably orange shoes with white pants. I thought I looked spectacular.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“There's something very visceral about watching people beg for money. It's powerful.”

“Working 24 hours a day isn't enough anymore. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, including your personal life, your family life, maybe more. If people think it's any less, they're wrong, and they will fail.”

“If you put a woman in prison for four years when she's young and make her pay her time in a horrible place and she wants to come out and work, and become a mother and be a contributor to society and pay taxes and you never give her that chance. There is something un-Canadian about that.”

“You'd rather own gold; never own the miner.”

“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.”

“Money has no grey areas. You either make it or you lose it.”

“I keep anywhere between 5-10 percent of my net worth in venture ideas.”

“As far as I'm concerned, Twitter has wiped out Facebook. I'm done with Facebook.”

“When you're travelling, your day is jam-packed. I just don't have time to whip out a PC all the time. But I can whip out a BlackBerry and tweet. I keep a constant diary of where I'm at and why I'm there.”

“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.”

“There's only one side with me. You get the right side. You get the correct version of the facts.”

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

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

“I do not own a single security anywhere that doesn't pay a dividend, and I formed a mutual-fund company with that very simple philosophy.”

“Having won re-election convincingly and against the economic odds, President Obama quickly made good on his promise of maintaining taxes as they are for the middle class while raising them on the wealthiest Americans.”