#Quote
The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.
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More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.
Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.
The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
