I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.
If you think something is impossible, don't disturb the person who is doing it!
There is an enormous inertia that prevents people from change. You must always remember that it is impossible to make something better if you don't make it different - the converse is not true, of course. You cannot make something better unless it is different. And different scares the life out of so many people.
Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.
No one ever won a chess game by betting on each move. Sometimes you have to move backward to get a step forward.
One hundred percent of our earnings are reinvested in the company, and a great deal of that goes to research.
We learned the value of research in World War II.
I loved music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound was so poor.
I hope that the institution will succeed in maximizing students' potential in the same way. I will give all of my stock to this institution. It will own the Bose Corporation and be funded by the Bose Corporation.
The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.
I really wanted to do research. That has never changed.
I'm forming a charitable institution for education.
I never went into business to make money.
The excitement level for me working on projects is really not a bit different from when I was 26.
The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.
At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations.
We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them.
There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.
But today the quickest way to save your bottom line is to cut off research.
At 13, I realized that I could fix anything electronic. It was amazing, I could just do it. I started a business repairing radios. It grew to be one of the largest in Philadelphia.
All military and most commercial aircraft use our designs that process power from jet engines.
Research in this country is going down.
I had studied violin from age 7 to 14.
