The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say 'I love you.' And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them.

Ears are made not for hearing but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive. Listening is something that we have to work at - it's a relationship with sound. And yet, it's a skill that none of us are taught.

It's a common mistake to speak the same to everybody. We all have different filters.

Listening is a crucial aspect of democracy. Listening creates understanding, and understanding permits one of the most important things about every democracy, which is civilized disagreement.

Every individual's listening is as unique as his or her fingerprints because we all listen through filters that develop from our personal mix of culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations and intentions. That is why one person's musical taste is another person's hideous noise.

Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition.

Intention is very important in sound, in listening. When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.

We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority.

My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, 'It's October 1 today,' and she said, 'I know, isn't it dreadful?' It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.