Top 30 Michael O'Leary Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Get back to work you slacker or you’re fired.”

— Michael O'Leary

2. “People say the customer is always right, but you know what – they’re not. Sometimes they are wrong and they need to be told so.”

— Michael O'Leary

3. “The airline industry is full of bullshitters, liars and drunks. We excel at all three in Ireland.”

— Michael O'Leary

4. “Are we going to say sorry for our lack of customer service? Absolutely not.”

— Michael O'Leary

5. “When you look at the number of stupid people who have succeeded in business, you clearly don’t have to be very bright. Business is all about getting your sales up and your costs down, the bit in the middle is profit.”

— Michael O'Leary

6. “We want to annoy the whenever we can. The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them.”

— Michael O'Leary

7. “I’m probably just an obnoxious little bollocks. Who cares?”

— Michael O'Leary

8. “University is the best couple of years of your life. Nowhere else can you drink and chase as many birds.”

— Michael O'Leary

9. “Germans will crawl bollock-naked over broken glass to get low fares.”

— Michael O'Leary

10. “Ryanair brings lots of different cultures to the beaches of Spain, Greece and Italy, where they couple and copulate in the interests of pan-European peace.”

— Michael O'Leary

11. “If drink sales are falling off, we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes sales.”

— Michael O'Leary

12. “I’m here with Howard Millar and Michael Cawley, our two deputy chief executives. But they’re presently making love in the gentleman’s toilets, such is their excitement at today’s results.”

— Michael O'Leary

13. “Code-sharing, alliances, and connections are all about “how do we screw the poor customer for more money?””

— Michael O'Leary

14. “I’m Europe’s most underpaid and underappreciated boss. I’m paid about 20 times more than the average Ryanair employee and I think the gap should be wider.”

— Michael O'Leary

15. “Air transport is just a glorified bus operation.”

— Michael O'Leary

16. “Why does every plane have two pilots? Really, you only need one pilot. Let’s take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it.”

— Michael O'Leary

17. “I should get the Nobel peace prize – screw Bono.”

— Michael O'Leary

18. “I have more money than I am ever going to need. Financially, I’m fine for the next couple of hundred years.”

— Michael O'Leary

19. “Ryanair’s biggest achievement? Bringing low fares to Europe and still lowering em. Biggest failure? Hiring me.”

— Michael O'Leary

20. “Anyone who thinks Ryanair flights are some sort of bastion of sanctity where you can contemplate your navel is wrong. We already bombard you with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things.”

— Michael O'Leary

21. “The airline business is it is mostly run by a bunch of spineless nincompoops who actually don’t want to stand up to the environmentalists and call them the lying wankers that they are.”

— Michael O'Leary

22. “The French have never produced a great philosopher. Great wine maybe, but no great philosophers.”

— Michael O'Leary

23. “Do we carry rich people on our flights? Yes, I flew on one this morning and I’m very rich.”

— Michael O'Leary

24. “The police force were outstanding in their field. But all they did was stand in their field. They kept passengers on board while they played with a suspect package for two and three quarter hours. Extraordinary.”

— Michael O'Leary

25. “It reminds me of two drunks leaning on each other.”

— Michael O'Leary

26. “She’s coming here with Aer Lingus.”

— Michael O'Leary

27. “One of the weaknesses of the company now is it is a bit cheap and cheerful and overly nasty, and that reflects my personality.”

— Michael O'Leary

28. “The most influential person in Europe in the last 20 to 30 years has been Margaret Thatcher. Without her we’d all be living in some French bloody unemployed republic.”

— Michael O'Leary

29. “It’s a great incentive to work long hours. I limit the holiday to two weeks and then get the hell back to the office. If I had my choice I wouldn’t take holidays but my wife insists on time with the kids. That’s enough. Prior to getting married I never took a holiday.”

— Michael O'Leary

30. “If global warming meant temperatures rose by one or two degrees, France would become a desert, which would be no bad thing. The Scots would grow wine and make buffalo mozzarella.”

— Michael O'Leary

31. “I’m disrespectful towards authority. I think the prime minister of Ireland is a gobshite.”

— Michael O'Leary

32. “The European Union spends most of its time either suing me, torturing me, criticizing me or condemning me for lowering the cost of air travel all over Europe.”

— Michael O'Leary

33. “In Sussex, if it’s not the Devil that makes an appearance, then it’s likely to be a dragon.”

— Michael O'Leary

34. “We need more people to go into business and fewer wasting our lives becoming bureaucrats and civil servants.”

— Michael O'Leary