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.

---

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

---

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

---

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---