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

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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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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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Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

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

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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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The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

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