In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.

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Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.

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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.

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The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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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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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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A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

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

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