#Quote

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.

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More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
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.
Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.
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.
I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.
Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.