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.

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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.

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Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

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The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

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Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.

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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.

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Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

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Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

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Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

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