“Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression.”

— Margaret Mead

Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man.
Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 121

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Margaret Mead133

American anthropologist 1901–1978

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“We can now return to the distinction between language and symbolism. A symbol is language and yet not language. A mathematical or logical or any other kind of symbol is invented to serve a purpose purely scientific; it is supposed to have no emotional expressiveness whatever. But when once a particular symbolism has been taken into use and mastered, it reacquires the emotional expressiveness of language proper. Every mathematician knows this. At the same time, the emotions which mathematicians find expressed in their symbols are not emotions in general, they are the peculiar emotions belonging to mathematical thinking.”

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Original: (it) La finezza esprime distinzione di spirito.
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James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

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telegraph.co.uk http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/10863146/Lang-Lang-Weve-never-met.html

“Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression.”

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Margaret Mead133

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