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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Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

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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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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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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.

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It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

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

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The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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