#Quote
More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
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.
In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.
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.
Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
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.
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
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.
